DETECTION OF STREET LIGHT POLES IN ROAD SCENES FROM MOBILE LIDAR MAPPING DATA FOR ITS APPLICATIONS

Abstract. Identification of street light poles is very significant and crucial for intelligent transportation systems. Automatic detection and extraction of street light poles are a challenging task in road scenes. This is mainly because of complex road scenes. Nowadays mobile laser scanners have been used to acquire three-dimensional geospatial data of roadways over a large area at a normal driving speed. With respect to the high density of such data, new and beneficial algorithms are needed to extract objects from these data. In this article, our proposed algorithm for extraction of street light poles consists of five main steps: 1. Preprocessing, 2. Ground removal, 3. 3D connected components analysis, 4. Local geometric feature generation, 5. Extraction of street light poles using Bhattacharya distance metric. The proposed algorithm is tested on two rural roadways, called Area1 and Area2. Evaluation results for Area1 report 0.80, 0.72 and 0.62 for completeness, correctness and quality, respectively.