Detection of Vertical Pole-Like Objects in a Road Environment Using Vehicle-Based Laser Scanning Data

Abstract

Accurate road environment information is needed in applications such as road maintenance and virtual 3D city modelling. Vehicle-based laser scanning (VLS) can produce dense point clouds from large areas efficiently from which the road and its environment can be modelled in detail. Pole-like objects such as traffic signs, lamp posts and tree trunks are an important part of road environments. An automatic method was developed for the extraction of pole-like objects from VLS data. The method was able to find 77.7% of the poles which were found by a manual investigation of the data. Correctness of the detection was 81.0%.