Automated extraction of ground surface along urban roads from mobile laser scanning point clouds

ABSTRACT

Extracting ground surface from high-density point clouds collected by Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems is of vital importance in urban planning and digital city mapping. This article proposes a novel approach for automated extraction of ground surface along urban roads from MLS point clouds. The approach, which was designed to handle both ordered and unordered MLS point clouds, consists of three key steps: constructing vertical profile from MLS point clouds along the vehicle trajectory; extracting candidate ground points using an adaptive alpha shapes algorithm; refining the candidate ground points with an elevation variance filter. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, experiments were conducted using two types of urban street-scene point clouds. The results reveal that the ground points can be detected with an error rate of as low as 1.9%, proving that our proposed method offers a promising solution for automated extraction of ground surface from MLS point clouds.

Acknowledgement

We thank Prof. Timothy Warner, Dr. Craig Cassells, and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 41471449], in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai [grant number 14ZR1412200] and in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China.