Road Centerline Extraction in Complex Urban Scenes From LiDAR Data Based on Multiple Features

Automatic extraction of roads from images of complex urban areas is a very difficult task due to the occlusions and shadows of contextual objects, and complicated road structures. As light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data explicitly contain direct 3-D information of the urban scene and are less affected by occlusions and shadows, they are a good data source for road detection. This paper proposes to use multiple features to detect road centerlines from the remaining ground points after filtering. The main idea of our method is to effectively detect smooth geometric primitives of potential road centerlines and to separate the connected nonroad features (parking lots and bare grounds) from the roads. The method consists of three major steps, i.e., spatial clustering based on multiple features using an adaptive mean shift to detect the center points of roads, stick tensor voting to enhance the salient linear features, and a weighted Hough transform to extract the arc primitives of the road centerlines. In short, we denote our method as Mean shift, Tensor voting, Hough transform (MTH). We evaluated the method using the Vaihingen and Toronto data sets from the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Test Project on Urban Classification and 3-D Building Reconstruction. The completeness of the extracted road network on the Vaihingen data and the Toronto data are 81.7% and 72.3%, respectively, and the correctness are 88.4% and 89.2%, respectively, yielding the best performance compared with template matching and phase-coded disk methods.