Recognizing Street Lighting Poles From Mobile LiDAR Data

In this paper, a novel segmentation and recognition approach to automatically extract street lighting poles from mobile LiDAR data is proposed. First, points on or around the ground are extracted and removed through a piecewise elevation histogram segmentation method. Then, a new graph-cut-based segmentation method is introduced to extract the street lighting poles from each cluster obtained through a Euclidean distance clustering algorithm. In addition to the spatial information, the street lighting pole's shape and the point's intensity information are also considered to formulate the energy function. Finally, a Gaussian-mixture-model-based method is introduced to recognize the street lighting poles from the candidate clusters. The proposed approach is tested on several point clouds collected by different mobile LiDAR systems. Experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to noises and achieves an overall performance of 90% in terms of true positive rate.