URBAN ROAD DETECTION IN AIRBONE LASER SCANNING POINT CLOUD USING RANDOM FOREST ALGORITHM

Abstract. The objective of this research is to detect points that describe a road surface in an unclassified point cloud of the airborne laser scanning (ALS). For this purpose we use the Random Forest learning algorithm. The proposed methodology consists of two stages: preparation of features and supervised point cloud classification. In this approach we consider ALS points, representing only the last echo. For these points RGB, intensity, the normal vectors, their mean values and the standard deviations are provided. Moreover, local and global height variations are taken into account as components of a feature vector. The feature vectors are calculated on a basis of the 3D Delaunay triangulation. The proposed methodology was tested on point clouds with the average point density of 12 pts/m2 that represent large urban scene. The significance level of 15% was set up for a decision tree of the learning algorithm. As a result of the Random Forest classification we received two subsets of ALS points. One of those groups represents points belonging to the road network. After the classification evaluation we achieved from 90% of the overall classification accuracy. Finally, the ALS points representing roads were merged and simplified into road network polylines using morphological operations.