POLE-LIKE OBJECTS RECOGNITION FROM MOBILE LASER SCANNING DATA USING SMOOTHING AND PRINCIPAL COMPONENT ANALYSIS

Abstract. With the spread of the Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) system, the demands for the management of road and facilities using MLS point clouds have increased. Especially, pole-like objects such as streetlights, utility poles, street signs and etc. are in high demand as facilities to be managed. We propose a method for recognizing pole-like objects from MLS point clouds. Our method is based on Laplacian smoothing using the k-nearest neighbors graph, Principal Component Analysis for recognizing points on pole-like objects, and thresholding for the degree of pole-like objects. Our method can robustly recognize pole-like objects with various radii and tilt angles from MLS point clouds. For correctly segmented objects, accuracy of pole-like object recognition is on average 97.4%.