Heuristic Road Extraction

The LiDAR system is used to gather 3D terrain information accurately and effectively. However, it is complicated to process the LiDAR data due to its irregularity and large number of collected data points. This paper proposes a novel method to extract urban road networks from 3D LiDAR data automatically. This method uses height and reflectance of LiDAR data, and clustered road point information. Geometric information of general roads is also applied to extract road points group correctly. The proposed method has been tested on urban areas which contain complicated road networks. The results demonstrate that the integration of height, reflectance and geometric information of roads is a crucial factor that distinguishes the proposed method in its ability to classify road points reliably and correctly.