ISPRS-Archives ISPRS - International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS-Archives Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 2194-9034 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W18-1001-2019 UTILITY POLES EXTRACTION FROM MOBILE LIDAR DATA IN URBAN AREA BASED ON DENSITY INFORMATION Shokri D. 1 Rastiveis H. 1 Shams A. 2 Sarasua W. A. 3 Department of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, School of Surveying and Geospatial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran Advanced Highway Maintenance & Construction Technology (AHMCT) Research Centre, University of California, Davis, CA, USA Glenn Department of Civil Engineering, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA 19 10 2019 XLII-4/W18 1001 1007 Copyright: © 2019 D. Shokri et al. 2019 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W18-1001-2019.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W18-1001-2019.pdf

Utility poles located along roads play a key role in road safety and planning as well as communications and electricity distribution. In this regard, new sensing technologies such as Mobile Terrestrial Laser Scanner (MTLS) could be an efficient method to detect utility poles and other planimetric objects along roads. However, due to the vast amount of data collected by MTLS in the form of a point cloud, automated techniques are required to extract objects from this data. This study proposes a novel method for automatic extraction of utility poles from the MTLS point clouds. The proposed algorithm is composed of three consecutive steps of pre-processing, cable area detection, and poles extraction. The point cloud is first pre-processed and then candidate areas for utility poles are specified based on Hough Transform (HT). Utility poles are extracted by applying horizontal and vertical density information to these areas. The performance of the method was evaluated on a sample point cloud and 98% accuracy was achieved in extracting utility poles using the proposed method.