Mobile mapping system for the automated detection and analysis of road delineation

This study will explore a low-cost mobile mapping system that has been developed to carry out road delineation surveys. This data acquisition system has been designed to be fully compatible for both mounting and calibration on any vehicle possessing a set of standard roof bars. This system, constructed inside a standard roof box, is fully self-contained and powered making it completely independent from the carrier vehicle. In order to allow ease of use by both field engineers and untrained personnel, user-friendliness was prominent in the design of both the hardware and the user interface. Simplified calibration procedures reduce set-up times and again allow untrained personnel to initialise the hardware. Two applications have been developed for this system. Automated raised pavement marker detection allows for the mapping of both functioning and non-functioning road studs using stereo reconstruction coupled with navigation data. A road line detection algorithm has also been developed to detect and extract road line data from captured images with a view to both assessing retroreflectivity and mapping these data for maintenance planning.