Extraction 3D road boundaries from mobile laser scanning point clouds

The demand for automated 3D road bounderies extraction is driven by the importance of maintaining and updating the fundamental geographic data of road for for various applications that support urban planning, traffic control, emergency response. Mobile laser scanning (MLS) as a promising technology for the rapid 3D mapping of road environment, provides a good means to capture every detail along the road corridor, including road boundaries, road markings, trees, buildings, traffic poles. This paper presents a new automatic method to detect road boundaries in MLS point clouds. The geometry and intensity information are both utilized to extract road boundary points from the raw point clouds. Experiments were undertaken to evaluate the validity of the proposed method based on two test dataset captured by Optech´s Lynx Mobile Mapper System. The well performances prove it to be a promising solution for extracting 3D road boundaries from MLS point clouds.