Search

The use of mobile laser scanning for mapping forests has scarcely been studied in difficult forest conditions. In this paper, we compare the accuracy of retrieving tree attributes, particularly diameter at breast height (DBH), stem curve, stem volume, and tree height, using six different laser scanning systems in a managed natural boreal forest. These compared systems operated both under the forest canopy on handheld and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platforms and above the canopy from a helicopter. The complexity of the studied forest sites ranged from easy to difficult, and thus, this is the first study to compare the performance of several laser scanning systems for the direct measurement of stem curve in difficult forest conditions. To automatically detect tree stems and to calculate their attributes, we utilized our previously developed algorithm integrated with a novel bias compensation method to reduce the overestimation of stem diameter arising from finite laser beam divergence. The bias compensation method reduced the absolute value of the diameter bias by 55–99%. The most accurate laser scanning systems were equipped with a Velodyne VLP-16 sensor, which has a relatively low beam divergence, on a handheld or UAV platform. In easy plots, these systems found a root-mean-square error (RMSE) of below 10% for DBH and stem curve estimates and approximately 10% for stem volume. With the handheld system in difficult plots, the DBH and stem curve estimates had an RMSE under 10%, and the stem volume RMSE was below 20%. Even though bias compensation reduced the difference in bias and RMSE between laser scanners with high and low beam divergence, the RMSE remained higher for systems with a high beam divergence. The airborne laser scanner operating above the forest canopy provided tree attribute estimates close to the accuracy of the under-canopy laser scanners, but with a significantly lower completeness rate for stem detection, especially in difficult forest conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forest understory complexity is important for many species, from large herbivores such as deer to small mammals such as mice and voles. For species that utilize the forest understory on a very small scale, it is often impractical to conduct correspondingly fine‐grained manual surveys of the understory, and thus few studies consider this small‐scale variation in understory complexity and instead work with average values on a larger scale. We explored the use of a mobile laser scanning derived understory complexity measure—understory roughness—to predict the capture probability of two representative small mammal species, the yellow‐necked mouse (Apodemus flavicollis) and the bank vole (Clethrionomys glareolus). We found a positive relationship between capture probability and understory roughness for both bank voles and yellow‐necked mice. Our results suggest that mobile laser scanning is a promising technology for measuring understory complexity in an ecologically meaningful way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study introduces an enhanced octree-based framework for integrated geotechnical analysis, combining geological, microseismic, and Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS)-based change detection data. Our approach leverages efficient statistical inference-based change detection techniques and additional octree data structures, enabling voxel-level data integration and association, semantic clustering, and comprehensive geotechnical analysis. We detail the implementation of our method, demonstrating capabilities such as integrating geological fault data, seismic energy exposure modeling, and combination of Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) classification with Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN). We conduct a suite of statistical analyses to investigate multi-dimensional trends and correlations among MLS-measured changes, distances to geological faults, and seismic energy exposure. We found that binary change classification and change magnitude negatively correlate with three investigated fault-distance metrics. Multivariant analysis reveals that increased seismic energy exposure and decreased fault distance positively correlates with MLS-based change classification and magnitudes. Our findings imply that proximity to geological faults and seismic energy exposure can be statistically linked to increases in geotechnically relevant deformations. This study is the first to demonstrate that octree-based MLS data processing can reveal multi-dimensional trends in underground mine datasets, thereby enhancing understanding of complex geomechanical behaviors crucial for mining productivity and safety. Highlights: Introduced octree-based framework for integrated geotechnical analysis. Combined geological, microseismic, and MLS data at voxel level. Utilized statistical inference for change detection in framework. Found correlations between MLS changes, fault proximity, and seismic energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The precise extraction of road boundaries is an essential task to obtain road infrastructure data that can support various applications, such as maintenance, autonomous driving, vehicle navigation, and the generation of high-definition maps (HD map). Despite promising outcomes in prior studies, challenges persist in road extraction, particularly in discerning diverse road types. The proposed methodology integrates state-of-the-art techniques like DBSCAN and RANSAC, aiming to establish a universally applicable approach for diverse mobile mapping systems. This effort represents a pioneering step in extracting road information from image-based point cloud data. To assess the efficacy of the proposed method, we conducted experiments using a large-scale dataset acquired by two mobile mapping systems on the Yıldız Technical University campus; one system was configured as a mobile LiDAR system (MLS), while the other was equipped with cameras to operate as a photogrammetry-based mobile mapping system (MMS). Using manually measured reference road boundary data, we evaluated the completeness, correctness, and quality parameters of the road extraction performance of our proposed method based on two datasets. The completeness rates were 93.2% and 84.5%, while the correctness rates were 98.6% and 93.6%, respectively. The overall quality of the road curb extraction was 93.9% and 84.5% for the two datasets. Our proposed algorithm is capable of accurately extracting straight or curved road boundaries and curbs from complex point cloud data that includes vehicles, pedestrians, and other obstacles in urban environment. Furthermore, our experiments demonstrate that the algorithm can be applied to point cloud data acquired from different systems, such as MLS and MMS, with varying spatial resolutions and accuracy levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efficient geometric evaluation of roads and tunnels is crucial to traffic management, especially in post-disaster situations. This paper reports on a study of the geometric feature detection method based on multi-sensor mobile laser scanning (MLS) system data. A portable, low-cost system that can be mounted on vehicles and utilizes integrated laser scanning devices was developed. Coordinate systems and timestamps from numerous devices were merged to create 3D point clouds of objects being measured. Feature points reflecting the geometric information of measuring objects were retrieved based on changes in the point cloud's shape, which contributed to measuring the road width, vertical clearance, and tunnel cross section. Self-developed software was used to conduct the measuring procedure, and a real-time online visualized platform was designed to reconstruct 3D models of the measured objects, forming a 3D digital map carrying the obtained geometric information. Finally, a case study was carried out. The measurement results of several representative nodes are discussed here, verifying the robustness of the proposed system. In addition, the main sources of interference are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The health and stability of trees are essential information for the safety of people and property in urban greenery, parks or along roads. The stability of the trees is linked to root stability but essentially also to trunk decay. Currently used internal tree stem decay assessment methods, such as tomography and penetrometry, are reliable but usually time-consuming and unsuitable for large-scale surveys. Therefore, a new method based on close-range remotely sensed data, specifically close-range photogrammetry and iPhone LiDAR, was tested to detect decayed standing tree trunks automatically. The proposed study used the PointNet deep learning algorithm for 3D data classification. It was verified in three different datasets consisting of pure coniferous trees, pure deciduous trees, and mixed data to eliminate the influence of the detectable symptoms for each group and species itself. The mean achieved validation accuracies of the models were 65.5% for Coniferous trees, 58.4% for Deciduous trees and 57.7% for Mixed data classification. The accuracies indicate promising data, which can be either used by practitioners for preliminary surveys or for other researchers to acquire more input data and create more robust classification models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution focuses on a comparison of modern geomatics technologies for the derivation of growth parameters in forest management. The present text summarizes the results of our measurements over the last five years. As a case project, a mountain spruce forest with planned forest logging was selected. In this locality, terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and terrestrial and drone close-range photogrammetry were experimentally used, as was the use of PLS mobile technology (personal laser scanning) and ALS (aerial laser scanning). Results from the data joining, usability, and economics of all technologies for forest management and ecology were discussed. ALS is expensive for small areas and the results were not suitable for a detailed parameter derivation. The RPAS (remotely piloted aircraft systems, known as "drones") method of data acquisition combines the benefits of close-range and aerial photogrammetry. If the approximate height and number of the trees are known, one can approximately calculate the extracted cubage of wood mass before forest logging. The use of conventional terrestrial close-range photogrammetry and TLS proved to be inappropriate and practically unusable in our case, and also in standard forestry practice after consultation with forestry workers. On the other hand, the use of PLS is very simple and allows you to quickly define ordered parameters and further calculate, for example, the cubic volume of wood stockpiles. The results from our research into forestry show that drones can be used to estimate quantities (wood cubature) and inspect the health status of spruce forests, However, PLS seems, nowadays, to be the best solution in forest management for deriving forest parameters. Our results are mainly oriented to practice and in no way diminish the general research in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gamification techniques have been proven effective in various fields such as education and industry. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that applies gamification techniques to the identification of road assets in Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) data. Our method utilises three gamification techniques: avatar (vehicle), point cloud segmentation into levels, and scoring. We implemented these techniques in Unreal Engine and evaluated their performance using three real-world case studies. We also compared two ways of point cloud visualisation: mesh-based and point-based. Our results demonstrate that our gamification approach improves the handling and visualisation of point clouds when compared to other free software such as Cloud Compare. Specifically, the point-based visualisation method provides a more accurate representation of the road environment and the input point cloud and is easier to import into Unreal Engine. However, this method requires more computational resources for visualisation. On the other hand, level segmentation ensures a constant frame rate of 60 frames per second. Furthermore, our gamification approach enhances the experience of road asset identification, making it more enjoyable for the user. However, we acknowledge that the quality of the point cloud remains the primary factor affecting the accuracy of asset identification, regardless of the software used. Overall, our proposed gamification approach offers a promising solution for improving the identification of road assets in MLS data and has the potential to be applied to other fields beyond road asset identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the present time, many publicly available point cloud datasets exist, which are mainly focused on autonomous driving. The objective of this study is to develop a new large-scale mobile 3D LiDAR point cloud dataset for outdoor scene semantic segmentation tasks, which has a classification scheme suitable for geospatial applications. Our dataset (Saint Petersburg 3D) contains both real-world (34 million points) and synthetic (34 million points) subsets that were acquired using real and virtual sensors with the same characteristics. An original classification scheme is proposed that contains a set of 10 universal object categories into which any scene represented by dense outdoor mobile LiDAR point clouds can be divided. The evaluation procedure for semantic segmentation of point clouds for geospatial applications is described. An experiment with the Kernel Point Fully Convolution Neural Network model trained on the proposed dataset was carried out. We obtained an overall 92.56% mIoU, which demonstrates the high efficiency of using deep learning models for point cloud semantic segmentation for geospatial applications in accordance with the proposed classification scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 3D semantic segmentation of a LiDAR point cloud is essential for various complex infrastructure analyses such as roadway monitoring, digital twin, or even smart city development. Different geometric and radiometric descriptors or diverse combinations of point descriptors can extract objects from LiDAR data through classification. However, the irregular structure of the point cloud is a typical descriptor learning problem—how to consider each point and its surroundings in an appropriate structure for descriptor extraction? In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have received much attention for automatic segmentation and classification. Previous studies demonstrated deep learning models' high potential and robust performance for classifying complicated point clouds and permutation invariance. Nevertheless, such algorithms still extract descriptors from independent points without investigating the deep descriptor relationship between the center point and its neighbors. This paper proposes a robust and efficient CNN-based framework named D-Net for automatically classifying a mobile laser scanning (MLS) point cloud in urban areas. Initially, the point cloud is converted into a regular voxelized structure during a preprocessing step. This helps to overcome the challenge of irregularity and inhomogeneity. A density value is assigned to each voxel that describes the point distribution within the voxel's location. Then, by training the designed CNN classifier, each point will receive the label of its corresponding voxel. The performance of the proposed D-Net method was tested using a point cloud dataset in an urban area. Our results demonstrated a relatively high level of performance with an overall accuracy (OA) of about 98% and precision, recall, and F1 scores of over 92%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuous flow of autonomous vehicle-based data could revolutionize current map updating procedures and allow completely new types of mapping applications. Therefore, in this article, we demonstrate the feasibility of using perception data of autonomous vehicles to replace traditionally conducted mobile mapping surveys with a case study focusing on updating a register of roadside city trees. In our experiment, we drove along a 1.3-km-long road in Helsinki to collect laser scanner data using our autonomous car platform ARVO, which is based on a Ford Mondeo hybrid passenger vehicle equipped with a Velodyne VLS-128 Alpha Prime scanner and other high-grade sensors for autonomous perception. For comparison, laser scanner data from the same region were also collected with a specially-planned high-grade mobile mapping laser scanning system. Based on our results, the diameter at breast height, one of the key parameters of city tree registers, could be estimated with a lower root-mean-square error from the perception data of the autonomous car than from the specially-planned mobile laser scanning survey, provided that time-based filtering was included in the post-processing of the autonomous perception data to mitigate distortions in the obtained point cloud. Therefore, appropriately performed post-processing of the autonomous perception data can be regarded as a viable option for keeping maps updated in road environments. However, point cloud-processing algorithms may need to be adapted for the post-processing of autonomous perception data due to the differences in the sensors and their arrangements compared to designated mobile mapping systems. We also emphasize that time-based filtering may be required in the post-processing of autonomous perception data due to point cloud distortions around objects seen at multiple times. This highlights the importance of saving the time stamp for each data point in the autonomous perception data or saving the temporal order of the data points. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Convergence and rockmass failure are significant hazards to personnel and physical assets in underground tunnels, caverns, and mines. Mobile Laser Scanning Systems (MLS) can deliver large volumes of point cloud data at a high frequency and on a large scale. However, current change detection approaches do not deliver sufficient sensitivity and precision for real-time performance on large-scale datasets. We present a novel, octree-based computational framework for intra-voxel statistical inference change detection and deformation analysis. Our approach exploits high-density MLS data to test for statistical significance for appearing objects caused by rockfall and for low-magnitude deformations, such as convergence. In field tests, our method detects rock falls with side lengths as small as 0.03 m and convergence as low as 0.01 m, or 0.5% wall-to-wall strain. When compared against a state-of-the-art multi-scale model-to-model cloud comparison (M3C2)-based method, ours is less sensitive to noisy data and parameter selection while also requiring fewer parameters. Most notably, our method is the only one tested that can perform real-time change detection on large-scale datasets on a single processor thread. Our method achieves a computational improvement of 50 times over single-threaded M3C2 while maintaining a performance scalability that is four times greater with dataset size. Our framework shows significant potential to enable accurate real-time geotechnical monitoring of large-scale underground spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The automatic extraction of individual tree from mobile laser scanning (MLS) scenes has important applications in tree growth monitoring, tree parameter calculation and tree modeling. However, trees often grow in rows and tree crowns overlap with varying shapes, and there is also incompleteness caused by occlusion, which makes individual tree extraction a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a trunk-constrained and tree structure analysis method to extract trees from scanned urban scenes. Firstly, multi-feature enhancement is performed via PointNet to segment the tree points from raw urban scene point clouds. Next, the candidate local tree trunk clusters are obtained by clustering based on the intercepted local tree trunk layer, and the real local tree trunk is obtained by removing noise data. Then, the trunk is located and extracted by combining circle fitting and region growing, so as to obtain the center of the tree crown. Further, the points near the tree's crown (core points) are segmented through distance difference, and the tree crown boundary (boundary points) is distinguished by analyzing the density and centroid deflection angle. Therefore, the core and boundary points are deleted to obtain the remaining points (intermediate points). Finally, the core, intermediate and boundary points, as well as the tree trunks, are combined to extract individual tree. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated on the Pairs-Lille-3D dataset, which is a benchmark for point cloud classification, and data were produced using a mobile laser system (MLS) applied to two different cities in France (Paris and Lille). Overall, the precision, recall, and F1-score of instance segmentation were 90.00%, 98.22%, and 99.08%, respectively. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can effectively extract trees with multiple rows of occlusion and improve the accuracy of tree extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of mobile laser scanning to survey forest ecosystems is a promising, scalable technology to describe the 3D structure of forests at a high resolution. We use a structurally complex, mixed-species Mediterranean forest to test the performance of a mobile Handheld Laser Scanning (HLS) system to estimate tree attributes within a forest patch in central Spain. We describe the different stages of the HLS approach: field position, ground data collection, scanning path design, point cloud processing, alignment between detected trees and measured reference trees, and finally, the assessment of main tree structural attributes diameter at breast height (DBH) and tree height considering species and tree size as control factors. We surveyed 418 reference trees to account for omission and commission error rates over a 1 ha plot divided into 16 sections and scanned using two different scanning paths. The HLS-based approach reached a high of 88 and 92% tree detection rate for the best combination of scanning path and point cloud processing modes for the HLS system. The root mean squared errors for DBH estimates varied between species: errors for Pinus pinaster were below 2 cm for Scan 02. Quercus pyrenaica, and Alnus glutinosa showed higher error rates. We observed good agreement between ALS and HLS estimates for tree height, highlighting differences to field measurements. Despite the complexity of the mixed forest area surveyed, our results show that HLS is highly efficient at detecting tree locations, estimating DBH, and supporting tree height measurements as confirmed with airborne laser data used for validation. This study is one of the first HLS-based studies conducted in the Mediterranean mixed forest region, where variability in tree allometries and spacing and the presence of natural regeneration pose challenges for the HLS approach. HLS is a feasible, time-efficient, scalable technology for tree mapping in mixed forests with potential to support forest monitoring programmes such as national forest inventories lacking three-dimensional, remote sensing data to support field measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing railway lines need to be updated with the ageing of railways and the demand for capacity increase, thus the surveying of railway lines is necessary without affecting its routine operations. However, the surveying of most of the existing railway lines still relies on traditional manual methods, which are characterized by low efficiency, heavy task, complex procedures, and repeated online. To address these priblems, this paper uses a least squares based 2D template point cloud matching approach to jointly and repeatedly calculate the rail track surface centre point position and then obtain the track centre line, track gauge and other related parameters based on absolute 3D point cloud data obtained by the track mobile laser scanning system. The test and result analysis at the track test site show that the proposed approach can effectively extract the track centre line and provide accurate centre line data for the existing line survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gardens play a key role in the definition of the cultural landscape since they reflect the culture, identity, and history of a people. They also contribute to the ecological balance of the city. Despite the fact that gardens have an historic and social value, they are not protected as much as the rest of the existing heritage, such as architecture and archaeological sites. While methods of built-heritage mapping and monitoring are increasing and constantly improving to reduce built-heritage loss and the severe impact of natural disasters, the documentation and survey techniques for gardens are often antiquated. In addition, inventories are typically made by non-updated/updateable reports, and they are rarely in digital format or in 3D. This paper presents the results of a comprehensive study on the latest technology for laser scanning in gardens. We compared static terrestrial laser scanning and mobile laser scanning point clouds generated by the Focus 3D S120 and the Leica BLK2GO, respectively, to evaluate their quality for documentation, estimate tree attributes, and terrain morphology. The evaluation is based on visual observation, C2C comparisons, and terrain information extraction capabilities, i.e., M3C2 comparisons for topography, DTM generation, and contour lines. Both methods produced useful outcomes for the scope of the research within their limitations. Terrestrial laser scanning is still the method that offers accurate point clouds with a higher point density and less noise. However, the more recent mobile laser scanning is able to survey in less time, significantly reducing the costs for site activities, data post-production, and registration. Both methods have their own restrictions that are amplified by site features, mainly the lack of plans for the geometric alignment of scans and the simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) process. We offer a critical description of the issues related to the functionality of the two sensors, such as the operative range limit, light dependency, scanning time, point cloud completeness and size, and noise level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although point features have shown their usefulness in classification with Machine Learning, point cloud visualization enhancement methods focus mainly on lighting. The visualization of point features helps to improve the perception of the 3D environment. This paper proposes Multi Feature-Rich Synthetic Colour (MFRSC) as an alternative non-photorealistic colour approach of natural-coloured point clouds. The method is based on the selection of nine features (reflectance, return number, inclination, depth, height, point density, linearity, planarity, and scattering) associated with five human perception descriptors (edges, texture, shape, size, depth, orientation). The features are reduced to fit the RGB display channels. All feature permutations are analysed according to colour distance with the natural-coloured point cloud and Image Quality Assessment. As a result, the selected feature permutations allow a clear visualization of the scene's rendering objects, highlighting edges, planes, and volumetric objects. MFRSC effectively replaces natural colour, even with less distorted visualization according to BRISQUE, NIQUE and PIQE. In addition, the assignment of features in RGB channels enables the use of MFRSC in software that does not support colorization based on point attributes (most commercially available software). MFRSC can be combined with other non-photorealistic techniques such as Eye-Dome Lighting or Ambient Occlusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To reduce the cost of manually annotating training data for supervised classifiers, we propose an automated approach to extract training data of urban objects in six classes: buildings, fences, man-made poles, vegetation, vehicles, and low objects. In this study, two segmentation algorithms are firstly implemented to generate meaningful objects from the non-ground point cloud. Then, we generated valid strict rules to label partial RANSAC (Random Sample Consensus) planes and meaningful objects as training data. The strict rules are built upon the semantic knowledge formed by the features of geometric, eigenvalue, RANSAC plane, multidimensional slice, and relative location. The accuracy of strict rule-based (SRB) training data is higher than 98.5 % for buildings, man-made poles, vegetation, and vehicles. The accuracy of low objects and fences reaches 97.10 % and 94.99 %, respectively. Finally, we compared the performance of the KPConv and PointNET++ networks trained by SRB and manually labeled training data to evaluate the effectiveness of our training data. The KPConv overall accuracy using manually labeled and (SRB) training data are 91.5 % and 86.8 % in the Paris dataset, 95.6 % and 92.0 % in the Freiburg dataset, respectively. The experiments demonstrate that automatically labeled training data can achieve similar accuracy compared to manual labels when coupled with two deep learning networks. Therefore, SRB training data extraction can effectively deal with the problem of training data scarcity and provide significant advancements in urban point cloud classification, where manual labeling of training data remains a crucial challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently, the street tree resource survey using Mobile laser scanning (MLS) represents a hot spot around the world. Refined trunk extraction is an essential step for 3D reconstruction of street trees. However, due to scanning errors and the effects of occlusion by various types of features in the urban environment, street tree point cloud data processing has the problem of excessive noise. For the noise points that are difficult to remove using statistical methods in close proximity to the tree trunk, we propose an adaptive trunk extraction and denoising method for street trees based on an improved iForest (Isolation Forest) algorithm. Firstly, to extract the individual tree trunk points, the trunk and the crown are distinguished from the individual tree point cloud through point cloud slicing. Next, the iForest algorithm is improved by conducting automatic calculation of the contamination and further used to denoise the tree trunk point cloud. Finally, the method is validated with five datasets of different scenes. The results indicate that our method is robust and effective in extracting and denoising tree trunks. Compared with the traditional Statistical Outlier Removal (SOR) filter and Radius filter denoising methods, the denoising accuracy of the proposed method can be improved by approximately 30% for noise points close to tree trunks. Compared to iForest, the proposed method automatically calculates the contamination, improving the automation of the algorithm. Our method can provide more precise trunk point clouds for 3D reconstruction of street trees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A mobile laser scanning (MLS) system can acquire railway scene information quickly and provide a data foundation for regular railway inspections. The location of the catenary support device in an electrified railway system has a direct impact on the regular operation of the power supply system. However, multi-type support device data accounts for a tiny proportion of the whole railway scene, resulting in its poor characteristic expression in the scene. Therefore, using traditional point cloud filtering or point cloud segmentation methods alone makes it difficult to achieve an effective segmentation and extraction of the support device. As a result, this paper proposes an automatic extraction algorithm for complex railway support devices based on MLS point clouds. First, the algorithm obtains hierarchies of the pillar point clouds and the support device point clouds in the railway scene through high stratification and then realizes the noise that was point-cloud-filtered in the scene. Then, the center point of the pillar device is retrieved from the pillar corridor by a neighborhood search, and then the locating and initial extracting of the support device are realized based on the relatively stable spatial topological relationship between the pillar and the support device. Finally, a post-processing optimization method integrating the pillar filter and the voxelized projection filter is designed to achieve the accurate and efficient extraction of the support device based on the feature differences between the support device and other devices in the initial extraction results. Furthermore, in the experimental part, we evaluate the treatment effect of the algorithm in six types of support devices, three types of support device distribution scenes, and two types of railway units. The experimental results show that the average extraction IoU of the multi-type support device, support device distribution scenes, and railway unit were 97.20%, 94.29%, and 96.11%, respectively. In general, the proposed algorithm can achieve the accurate and efficient extraction of various support devices in different scenes, and the influence of the algorithm parameters on the extraction accuracy and efficiency is elaborated in the discussion section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional railway survey adopts a manual observation method, such as a total station measuring system. This method has high precision, but the amount of data is small, and the measurement efficiency is low. Manual measurement cannot meet the requirements of dynamic continuous high-precision holographic measurement during railway outages. Mobile laser scanning is a mobile mapping system based mainly on a laser scanner, inertial measurement unit (IMU) and panoramic camera. Mobile laser scanning has the advantages of high efficiency, high precision and automation. However, integrating inertial navigation data and mobile laser scanning data to obtain real 3D information about railways has always been an urgent problem to be solved. Therefore, a point cloud reconstruction method is proposed based on trajectory filtering for a mobile laser scanning system. This paper corrects the odometer data by identifying railway feature points through deep learning and uses Rauch–Tung–Striebel (RTS) filtering to optimize the trajectory results. Combined with the railway experimental track data, the maximum difference in the east and north coordinate direction can be controlled within 7 cm, and the average elevation error is 2.39 cm. This paper applies a multi-sensor integrated mobile detection system to railway detection. It is of great significance to the healthy development of the intelligent railway system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban trees are vital elements of outdoor scenes via mobile laser scanning (MLS), accurate individual trees detection from disordered, discrete, and high-density MLS is an important basis for the subsequent analysis of city management and planning. However, trees cannot be easily extracted because of the occlusion with other objects in urban scenes. In this work, we propose a coarse-to-fine individual trees detection method from MLS point cloud data (PCD) based on treetop points extraction and radius expansion. Firstly, an improved semantic segmentation deep network based on PointNet is applied to segment tree points from the scanned urban scene, which combining spatial features and dimensional features. Next, through calculating the local maximum, the candidate treetop points are located. In addition, the optimized treetop points are extracted after the tree point projection plane was filtered to locate the candidate treetop points, and a distance rule is used to eliminate the pseudo treetop points then the optimized treetop points are obtained. Finally, after the initial clustering of treetop points and vertical layering of tree points, a top-down layer-by-layer segmentation based on radius expansion to realize the complete individual extraction of trees. The effectiveness of the proposed method is tested and evaluated on five street scenes in point clouds from Oakland outdoor MLS dataset. Furthermore, the proposed method is compared with two existing individual trees segmentation methods. Overall, the precision, recall, and F-score of instance segmentation are 98.33%, 98.33%, and 98.33%, respectively. The results indicate that our method can extract individual trees effectively and robustly in different complex environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of mobile laser scanning (MLS) systems that use simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) technology to map their environment opens up new opportunities for characterizing forest structure. The speed and accuracy of data acquisition makes them particularly adapted to operational inventories. MLS also shows great potential for estimating inventory attributes that are difficult to measure in the field, such as wood volume or crown dimensions. Hardwood species represent a significant challenge for wood volume estimation compared to softwoods because a substantial portion of the volume is included in the crown, making them more prone to allometric bias and more complex to model. This study assessed the potential of MLS data to estimate tree structural attributes in a temperate hardwood stand: height, crown dimensions, diameter at breast height (DBH), and merchantable wood volume. Merchantable wood volume estimates were evaluated to the third branching order using the quantitative structural modeling (QSM) approach. Destructive field measurements and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) data of 26 hardwood trees were used as reference to quantify errors on wood volume and inventory attribute estimations from MLS data. Results reveal that SLAM-based MLS systems provided accurate estimates of tree height (RMSE = 0.42 m (1.78%), R2 = 0.93), crown projected area (RMSE = 3.23 m2 (5.75%), R2 = 0.99), crown volume (RMSE = 71.4 m3 (23.38%), R2 = 0.99), DBH (RMSE = 1.21 cm (3.07%), R2 = 0.99), and merchantable wood volume (RMSE = 0.39 m3 (18.57%), R2 = 0.95), when compared to TLS. They also estimated operational merchantable volume with good accuracy (RMSE = 0.42 m3 (21.82%), R2 = 0.94) compared to destructive measurements. Finally, the merchantable stem volume derived from MLS data was estimated with high accuracy compared to TLS (RMSE = 0.11 m3 (8.32%), R2 = 0.96) and regional stem taper models (RMSE = 0.16 m3 (14.7%), R2 = 0.93). We expect our results would provide a better understanding of the potential of SLAM-based MLS systems to support in-situ forest inventory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outdated or sketchy inventory of street furniture may misguide the planners on the renovation and upgrade of transportation infrastructures, thus posing potential threats to traffic safety. Previous studies have taken their steps using point clouds or street-view imagery (SVI) for street furniture inventory, but there remains a gap to balance semantic richness, localization accuracy and working efficiency. Therefore, this paper proposes an effective pipeline that combines SVI and point clouds for the inventory of street furniture. The proposed pipeline encompasses three steps: (1) Off-the-shelf street furniture detection models are applied on SVI for generating two-dimensional (2D) proposals and then three-dimensional (3D) point cloud frustums are accordingly cropped; (2) The instance mask and the instance 3D bounding box are predicted for each frustum using a multi-task neural network; (3) Frustums from adjacent perspectives are associated and fused via multi-object tracking, after which the object-centric instance segmentation outputs the final street furniture with 3D locations and semantic labels. This pipeline was validated on datasets collected in Shanghai and Wuhan, producing component-level street furniture inventory of nine classes. The instance-level mean recall and precision reach 86.4%, 80.9% and 83.2%, 87.8% respectively in Shanghai and Wuhan, and the point-level mean recall, precision, weighted coverage all exceed 73.7%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applicability of SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) technology for mine surveys and subsequent 3D modelling of post-extracted surfaces is assessed. The resulting surface geometry is validated via terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) acquired reference data. Typical discrepancies remained within 2 and 5 cm in horizontal and vertical directions, respectively. Discrepancies between TLS, SLAM-enabled handheld scanner and conventional surveying results are small and fully satisfy the contemporary accuracy requirements, yet evidence that the conventional mine survey results are affected by the subjectivity of the surveyors. The SLAM-enabled laser scanning hence appears to be the most suitable method for underground mining surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As innovative technologies emerge, extensive research has been undertaken to develop new structural health monitoring procedures. The current methods, involving on-site visual inspections, have proven to be costly, time-consuming, labor-intensive, and highly subjective for assessing the safety and integrity of civil infrastructures. Mobile and stationary LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) devices have significant potential for damage detection, as the scans provide detailed geometric information about the structures being evaluated. This paper reviews the recent developments for LiDAR-based structural health monitoring, in particular, for detecting cracks, deformation, defects, or changes to structures over time. In this regard, mobile laser scanning (MLS) and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), specific to structural health monitoring, were reviewed for a wide range of civil infrastructure systems, including bridges, roads and pavements, tunnels and arch structures, post-disaster reconnaissance, historical and heritage structures, roofs, and retaining walls. Finally, the existing limitations and future research directions of LiDAR technology for structural health monitoring are discussed in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) applications, filtering is a necessary step. In this paper, a segmentation-based filtering method is proposed for MLS point cloud, where a segment rather than an individual point is the basic processing unit. In particular, the MLS point clouds in some blocks are clustered into segments by a surface growing algorithm, and then the object segments are detected and removed. A segment-based filtering method is employed to detect the ground segments. The experiment in this paper uses two MLS point cloud datasets to evaluate the proposed method. Experiments indicate that, compared with the classic progressive TIN (Triangulated Irregular Network) densification algorithm, the proposed method is capable of reducing the omission error, the commission error and total error by 3.62%, 7.87% and 5.54% on average, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[Display omitted] Deep learning (DL) semantic segmentation of tunnel point cloud shows an efficient path for applications related to subway tunnel scenes, such as health inspection and building information modelling (BIM). Current methods for tunnel point cloud segmentation often suffer from a shortage of benchmarks. This paper proposed a large-scale, multi-modal dataset for semantic segmentation of subway tunnel point cloud called subway tunnel segmentation dataset (STSD). The STSD comprises point clouds and projected images annotated into 12 categories, encompassing three types of subway tunnels with a combined length exceeding 2700 m, totaling over 2.26 billion points. A novel approach for DL semantic segmentation of subway tunnel point clouds is proposed herein. This approach enables the direct utilization of image-based DL segmentation networks on subway tunnel point clouds. Furthermore, it incorporates a lossless coordinate transformation method capable of converting tunnel point clouds of any cross-section shape into images with minimal information loss. Further evaluation of several classic or state-of-the-art 2D and 3D DL semantic segmentation models shows the feasibility of the approach and dataset. The best 2D model achieves a mIoU of 86.26% and outperforms the best 3D model by almost 10%. This research provides a novel approach for DL semantic segmentation in subway tunnel point clouds, contributes a large-scale, multi-modal dataset for the tunnel semantic segmentation, and creates a benchmark for further evaluation of the corresponding algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roadway deformation is a comprehensive response to changes in surrounding rock masses as well as the geological environment. Deformation patterns survey can help us to understand rock masses, especially soft swelling rock mass and guide roadway renovation. In this paper, an overall deformation analysis method for a largely deformed roadway in soft swelling rock mass has been proposed based on 3D mobile laser scanning. The application procedures of the proposed method mainly include point cloud data acquisition, data pre-processing, coordinate transformation, surface change detection and visualization. In the proposed method, the reference point cloud is created according to the roadway design to overcome the issue of the missing original roadway profile point cloud. By incorporating the K-nearest neighbor algorithm, a point-to-plane distance calculation algorithm is developed for the source and the reference point cloud data to detect roadway deformation. Taking the main haulage roadway in skarn rock mass at − 480 m level of Taiping Mine as an example, the deformation patterns of this roadway were analyzed using the proposed method. The results reveal that the roadway deformed seriously up to 1187 mm and the roadway deformation characterizes asymmetry and non-uniformity. The accuracy of the proposed method can meet engineering requirements by comparing the calculated and measured results. Aiming at the asymmetrical deformation patterns of this roadway, an asymmetrical support methodology has been suggested for the roadway renovation. The proposed deformation analysis method provides a reliable tool for largely deformed underground workings in soft swelling rock mass. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accidents and fatalities during scaffolding work are significant concerns in the construction industry. Scaffold monitoring technology based on 3D reconstruction can offer a potential solution to prevent such fatalities. However, the practical application of this technology at actual construction sites faces a notable challenge due to the presence of safety nets. Safety nets hinder the acquisition of complete scaffold point clouds necessary for reconstruction. To address this issue, we propose a novel registration method for scaffold point clouds that considers safety nets, employing sensor fusion and deep learning techniques. The method consists of three steps: 1) LiDAR-camera calibration and SLAM-based point cloud data acquisition, 2) object detection and coordinate transformation, and 3) identification of scaffold installation stages and point cloud registration. The proposed method was verified to be effective in registering scaffold point clouds without safety nets. • The proposed method registers scaffold point clouds considering the installation of safety nets for 3D reconstruction. • Sensor fusion and deep learning are used to estimate the global coordinates of objects during scaffolding work. • By identifying the installation stages of scaffolds, a point cloud map without safety nets is obtained. • The effectiveness of the method is validated at the real scaffold installation site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Aims In addition to terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), mobile laser scanning (MLS) is increasingly arousing interest as a technique which provides valuable 3-D data for various applications in forest research. Using mobile platforms, the 3-D recording of large forest areas is carried out within a short space of time. Vegetation structure is described by millions of 3-D points which show an accuracy in the millimetre range and offer a powerful basis for automated vegetation modelling. The successful extraction of single trees from the point cloud is essential for further evaluations and modelling at the individual-tree level, such as volume determination, quantitative structure modelling or local neighbourhood analyses. However, high-precision automated tree segmentation is challenging, and has so far mostly been performed using elaborate interactive segmentation methods. Methods Here, we present a novel segmentation algorithm to automatically segment trees in MLS point clouds, applying distance adaptivity as a function of trajectory. In addition, tree parameters are determined simultaneously. In our validation study, we used a total of 825 trees from ten sample plots to compare the data of trees segmented from MLS data with manual inventory parameters and parameters derived from semi-automatic TLS segmentation. Key Results The tree detection rate reached 96 % on average for trees with distances up to 45 m from the trajectory. Trees were almost completely segmented up to a distance of about 30 m from the MLS trajectory. The accuracy of tree parameters was similar for MLS-segmented and TLS-segmented trees. Conclusions Besides plot characteristics, the detection rate of trees in MLS data strongly depends on the distance to the travelled track. The algorithm presented here facilitates the acquisition of important tree parameters from MLS data, as an area-wide automated derivation can be accomplished in a very short time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multipath effects and signal obstruction by buildings in urban canyons can lead to inaccurate GNSS measurements and therefore errors in the estimated trajectory of Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems; consequently, derived point clouds are distorted and lose spatial consistency. We obtain decimetre-level trajectory accuracy making use of corresponding points between the MLS data and aerial images with accurate exterior orientations instead of using ground control points. The MLS trajectory is estimated based on observation equations resulting from these corresponding points, the original IMU observations, and soft constraints on the pitch and yaw rotations of the vehicle. We analyse the quality of the trajectory enhancement under several conditions where the experiments were designed to test the influence of the number and quality of corresponding points and to test different settings for a B-spline representation of the vehicle trajectory. The method was tested on two independently acquired MLS datasets in Rotterdam by enhancing the trajectories and evaluating them using checkpoints. The RMSE values of the original GNSS/IMU based Kalman filter results at the checkpoints were 0.26 m, 0.30 m, and 0.47 m for the X-, Y- and Z-coordinates in the first dataset and 1.10 m, 1.51 m, and 1.81 m in the second dataset. The latter dataset was recorded with a lower quality IMU in an area with taller buildings. After trajectory adjustment these RMSE values were reduced to 0.09 m, 0.11 m, and 0.16 m for the first dataset and 0.12 m, 0.14 m, and 0.18 m for the second dataset. The results confirmed that, if sufficient tie points between the point cloud and aerial imagery are available, the method supports geo-referencing of MLS point clouds in urban canyons with a near-decimetre accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: In recent years, the convergence of shield tunnel using the terrestrial laser scanning is more and more widely, but stations changed frequently have an extreme influence on monitoring efficien-cy. The position of endpoints will change with the tunnel deformation when the laser point clouds is applied to fit curve in order to calculate the coordinates of endpoints. Therefore, it is difficult to ensure that the same convergent endpoints are obtained at different times using fitting curve based on point clouds which have an influence on the precision of convergence.Methods: Aiming at the problem of low efficiency of sta-tion-based 3D laser scanning, this paper introduces an economical, efficient and reliable mobile laser scan-ning monitoring method. For the calculation of convergence value, this paper introduces a new method based on tunnel expanded image in detail. Firstly, the expanded images of tunnel were obtained by the cy-lindrical projection of point clouds, the expansion of standard cylinder and gray rasterization, interpolation and gray enhancement of image. Secondly, it can accurately locate the section of point clouds of each ring in shield tunnel through the binaryzation of image, connected analysis, automatic identification and manual correction of ring cracks. Then, the positions between segments of each ring were manually drawn in the expanded image and the orientations of the fixed endpoints were deduced. Finally, the coordinates of the convergent endpoints were calculated and the convergences were calculated by fitting the segments. Re- sults: The results show that the difference between the repetitive results of the convergence value using mo-bile laser scanning is less than 1.5 mm. Conclusions: The proposed calculation method can efficiently moni-tor the convergence of the single-circle shield tunnel with reliable accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile laser scanning is being used more often in Estonia and abroad to obtain geospatial information. As the system is still new and being upgraded, different methods are being used to find out how accurately the mobile laser scanner can measure in different conditions. In this article the mobile laser scanner accuracy is being examined depending on surrounding environment and the importance of postprocessing. Mobile laser scanning elevation data accuracy obtained in difficult conditions is being assessed. Difficult conditions are considered locations where there are tall objects that interrupt the satellite signals' trajectory to the receiver. To determine the elevation accuracy of mobile laser scanner data, coordinates with the raw broadcast and final ephemerides with the combination of the GNSS receivers' data that were installed in ideal and not ideal environmental conditions were computed. As a result of the study, the error of the elevation data in the first polygon, situated in difficult conditions was 7 mm when the Kunda reference station data was used with raw broadcast and final ephemerides. Error in the second polygon was accordingly 17 mm and 19 mm. When calculations were conducted using raw broadcast ephemerides in a base station in an imperfect environment, the error in the first polygon was 103 mm and in the second 75 mm. When the precise ephemerides were added to base station data, the error in the first polygon was 6 mm and in the second 21 mm. From the study results, it could be concluded that the mobile laser scanning system measures within 2 cm accuracy even in a complicated environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Falls from scaffolds cause the majority of accidents and fatalities at construction sites. A deep learning-based 3D reconstruction technology could provide a solution to prevent such fatalities through automated scaffold monitoring. However, when the technology was used at a large-scale construction site, there were limitations, such as the scarcity of point cloud data and the non-uniformity of points. To address this issue, this paper presents a large-scale scaffold reconstruction method using synthetic scaffold datasets and an upsampling adversarial network. The method consists of four steps: 1) data acquisition of scaffold point cloud through a mobile laser scanning (MLS) system, 2) 3D semantic segmentation using synthetic datasets, 3) upsampling of the segmented scaffold points, and 4) automatic generation of a 3D CAD model. The performance of the segmentation model trained with synthetic datasets achieved an 80.83% F1 score, which improved to 94.93% after upsampling. • The proposed method reconstructs a large-scale scaffold using a MLS system. • A synthetic dataset generation algorithm was developed to overcome data scarcity. • Scaffold points became dense after using an upsampling adversarial network. • An F1 score for scaffold point clouds was 94.93%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detecting metro gauge is very important for the safe operation of the subway. In this study, we design a low-cost metro tunnel mobile scanning system (MDS-TJ-1), which integrates a laser profile scanner with an inertial measure unit and an odometer to provide positioning and attitude parameters of the trajectory. The Lagrange interpolation is used to accomplish the time unification of different sensors. A dynamic alignment scheme for profile scanner is proposed based on the designed plane reflector target with high reflectivity. The error accumulation of the odometer is corrected by recognising the tunnel longitudinal joints, and finish the multi-source data fusion. The horizontal ray method is developed to process the metro gauge inspection. The experiment results show that the alignment accuracy of scanner is within 8 mm, the inner coincidence of the point cloud is within 3 cm, and the average error of the gauge inspection is 7.8 mm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile laser scanning (MLS) measurement technology is well-suited for individual-tree-based urban forest inventory because it can capture a dense three-dimensional (3D) point cloud from vertical structures of roadside trees in a rapid and cost-effective way. Street tree segmentation from MLS data is a preliminary and essential step for further extraction and analysis of tree attributes and is also a challenging problem because of the complex street environment. The accuracy of current methods is limited by information loss introduced by voxelization and artificially designed detection and segmentation rules based on prior knowledge that more or less lack ability to distinguish between street trees and other urban objects. To address the above issues, a two-step strategy for street tree segmentation method from MLS data was proposed, which worked on points directly instead of a set of voxels generated by spatial partition and made use of tree crown and trunk detectors trained by supervised learning algorithm. First, 16 local statistical features, including width, depth, elevation, dimensionality, and density features, were extracted from the sphere domain of each point using the grid index. Then these features were fused and tree crown and trunk detectors were trained from labelled MLS data of street through Discrete AdaBoost algorithm. Second, based on frame projection of point-wise prediction results of tree crown and trunk detectors, individual trees were located and segmented by exploiting non-connectivity between adjacent trees and adjacency within single trees. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method can obtain point-wise street tree segmentation from MLS data with high accuracy tree crown and trunk detection without tedious detection or segmentation rules. The error rates of crown detector on test set were less than 0.3% accompanied by over 99.33% recall rates and over 98.59% precision rates and the error rates of trunk detector on test set were less than 0.06% accompanied by over 92.44% recall rates and over 94.14% precision rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forest inventory (FI) is the most challenging stage of forest management and planning process. Therefore, in situ surveys are often reinforced by modern remote sensing (RS) methods for collecting forestry-related data more efficiently. This study tests a stateof- the-art data collection method for practical use in the Turkish FI system for the first time. To this end, forest sampling plots were conventionally measured to collect dendrometric data from 437 trees in Artvin and Saçınka Forest Enterprises. Then, each plot was scanned using a handheld mobile laser scanning (HMLS) instrument. Finally, HMLS data were compared against ground measurements via basic FI measures. Based on statistical tests, no apparent differences were found between the two datasets at the plot level (P < 0.05). There were also robust correlations for diameter breast height at individual tree level (r > 0.97; P < 0.01). Residual analysis showed that both positive and negative errors had a homogeneous distribution, except for plot 8 where tree stems were in irregular shapes due to anthropogenic pressures. When all plots' data were aggregated, average values for the number of trees, basal area, and timber volume were estimated as 535 trees/ha-1, 49.6 m²/ha-1, and 499.7 m³/ha-1, respectively. Furthermore, secondary measures such as the number of saplings and slope were successfully retrieved using HMLS method. The highest overestimation was in timber volume with less than 10% difference at the landscape level. The differences were attributed to poor data quality of conventional measurements, as well as marginal site conditions in some plots. We concluded that the HMLS method met the accuracy standards for most FI measures, except for stand height. Thus, the Turkish FI system could benefit from this novel technology, which in turn supports the implementation of sound forest management and planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forest inventories rely on field plots, the measurement of which is costly and time consuming by manual means. Thus, there is a need to automate plot-level field data collection. Mobile laser scanning has yet to be demonstrated for deriving stem curve and volume from standing trees with sufficient accuracy for supporting forest inventory needs. We tested a new approach based on pulse-based backpack mobile laser scanner (Riegl VUX-1HA) combined with in-house developed SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping), and a novel post-processing algorithm chain that allows one to extract stem curves from scan-line arcs corresponding to individual standing trees. The post-processing step included, among others, an algorithm for scan-line arc extraction, a stem inclination angle correction and an arc matching algorithm correcting for the drifts that are still present in the stem points after applying the SLAM algorithm. By using the stem curves defined by the detected arcs and tree heights provided by the pulse-based scanner, stem volume estimates for standing trees in easy (n = 40) and medium (n = 37) difficult boreal forest were calculated. In the easy and medium plots, 100% of pine and birch stems were correctly detected. The total RMSE of the extracted stem curves was 1.2 cm (5.1%) and 1.7 cm (6.7%) for the easy and medium plots, respectively. The RMSE were 1.8 m (8.7%) and 1.1 m (4.9%) for the estimated tree heights, and 9.7% and 10.9% for the stem volumes for the easy and medium plots, correspondingly. Thus, our processing chain provided stem volume estimates with a better accuracy than previous methods based on mobile laser scanning data. Importantly, the accuracy of stem volume estimation was comparable to that provided by terrestrial laser scanning approaches in similar forest conditions. To further demonstrate the performance of the proposed method, we compared our results against stem volumes calculated using the standard Finnish allometric volume model, and found that our method provided more accurate volume estimates for the two test sites. The findings are important steps towards future individual-tree-based airborne laser scanning inventories which currently lack cost-efficient and accurate field reference data collection techniques. The tree geometry defined by the stem curve is also an important input parameter for deriving quality-related information from trees. Forest management decision making will benefit from improvements to the efficiency and quality of individual tree reference information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mapping of road boundaries provides critical information about roads for urban road traffic safety. This paper presents a deep learning-based framework for recovering 3D road boundary using multi-source data, which include mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds, spatial trajectory data, and remote sensing images. The proposed road recovery method uses extracted 3D road boundaries from MLS point clouds as inputs. First, after automatic erroneous boundary removal, a CNN-based boundary completion model completes road boundaries. Then, to refine the imperfect road boundaries, road centerlines generated from dynamic taxi GPS trajectory data and remote sensing images are used as completion guidance for a generative adversarial nets model to obtain more accurate and complete road boundaries. Finally, after associating a sequence of taxi GPS recorded trajectory points with the correct 3D road boundaries, inherent geometric road characteristics and road dynamic information are extracted from the complete boundaries and taxi GPS trajectory data, respectively. The testing dataset contains two urban road MLS datasets, and the KITTI dataset. The experimental results on point clouds from different sensors demonstrate our proposed method is effective and promising for recovering 3D road boundary and extracting road characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Registration is one of the most important tasks in mobile laser scanning (MLS) point cloud processing. This paper firstly reviews existing target‐free matching techniques as well as methods to evaluate the quality of the registration. Next, a new error metric is introduced that takes into account the residuals of check planes as well as their orientation. Experiments using real datasets in combination with reference data were performed to evaluate the suitability of these metrics. The proposed error metric proved to be more suitable for evaluating the quality of point cloud registration than state‐of‐the‐art equivalents. The results also indicate that least squares plane fitting is the best technique for MLS point cloud registration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of tunnels is increasing sharply, especially in China, due to the development of urban rail transit networks. It is thus crucial to study rapid structural deformation detection methods for tunnels in operation. A dynamic tunnel monitoring system can directly obtain cross sections. However, using only odometers to locate the cross sections along the track of a tunnel results in insufficient accuracy. Furthermore, the measured cross sections are all in local coordinate systems, providing no indication of curved tunnels and restricting 3D display capabilities. This paper focuses on a relative positioning method based on mobile laser scanning to improve the accuracy, together with a unified positioning method to relate the measured cross sections in a single system. The accuracy and applicability of the proposed methods are verified by experiments which demonstrate that the solutions can fully meet accuracy requirements and 3D display purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Road furniture recognition has become a prevalent issue in the past few years because of its great importance in smart cities and autonomous driving. Previous research has especially focussed on pole-like road furniture, such as traffic signs and lamp posts. Published methods have mainly classified road furniture as individual objects. However, most road furniture consists of a combination of classes, such as a traffic sign mounted on a street light pole. To tackle this problem, we propose a framework to interpret road furniture at a more detailed level. Instead of being interpreted as single objects, mobile laser scanning data of road furniture is decomposed in elements individually labelled as poles, and objects attached to them, such as, street lights, traffic signs and traffic lights. In our framework, we first detect road furniture from unorganised mobile laser scanning point clouds. Then detected road furniture is decomposed into poles and attachments (e.g. traffic signs). In the interpretation stage, we extract a set of features to classify the attachments by utilising a knowledge-driven method and four representative types of machine learning classifiers, which are random forest, support vector machine, Gaussian mixture model and naïve Bayes, to explore the optimal method. The designed features are the unary features of attachments and the spatial relations between poles and their attachments. Two experimental test sites in Enschede dataset and Saunalahti dataset were applied, and Saunalahti dataset was collected in two different epochs. In the experimental results, the random forest classifier outperforms the other methods, and the overall accuracy acquired is higher than 80% in Enschede test site and higher than 90% in both Saunalahti epochs. The designed features play an important role in the interpretation of road furniture. The results of two epochs in the same area prove the high reliability of our framework and demonstrate that our method achieves good transferability with an accuracy over 90% through employing the training data of one epoch to test the data in another epoch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poor GNSS measurements in urban areas caused by blocked GNSS signals and multi-path is a well-known problem, which leads to an inaccurate trajectory estimation of Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) platforms. Consequently, the MLS point cloud contains positioning errors. This paper presents a new method for the automatic extraction of accurate 3D tie points for the trajectory adjustment of MLS platforms in GNSS denied or troubled areas. The new method relies on aerial imagery as a reliable external source of reference provided that accurate exterior orientation parameters are available. Accordingly, one of the main objectives is to register the mobile laser scanning point cloud with corresponding aerial images. The matches between aerial images are used to obtain 3D tie points by forward intersection. By also determining the corresponding locations in the point cloud we obtain a 3D-3D correspondence between the MLS point cloud and the aerial images. In the future, the obtained 3D-3D correspondences will be used for trajectory adjustment. Our automatic tie point extraction procedure is tested on two independent MLS point clouds. The point clouds were acquired by two different platforms in Rotterdam. The aerial imagery of the same area was acquired at a different time. We evaluated the matching results for both datasets and concluded that the new procedure reliably extracted the 3D tie points for 55% of the tiles of the size of 90 m from the first MLS dataset. In the second dataset, 60% of the tiles of size 74 m yielded reliable 3D tie points. It is not necessary to successfully register all tiles because the results of this work will be used for the trajectory adjustment and the IMU can reliably support the positioning for small intervals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objects are formed by various structures and such structural information is essential for the identification of objects, especially for street facilities presented by mobile laser scanning (MLS) data with abundant details. However, due to the large volume of data, large variations in point density, noise and complexity of scanned scenes, the achievement of effective decomposition of objects into physical meaningful structures remains a challenge issue. And structural information has been rarely considered to improve the accuracy of distinguishing between objects with global or local similarity, such as traffic signs and traffic lights. Therefore, we propose a structural segmentation and classification method for MLS point clouds that is efficient and robust to variations in point density and complex urban scenes. During the segmentation stage, a novel region growing approach and a multi-size supervoxel segmentation algorithm robust to noise and varying density are combined to extract effective local shape descriptors. Structural components with physically meaningful labels are generated via structural labelling and clustering. During the classification stage, we consider the structural information at various scales and locations and encode it into a conditional random-field model for unary and pairwise inferences. High-order potentials are also introduced into the conditional random field to eliminate regional label noise. These high-order potentials are defined upon regions independent of connection relationships and can therefore take effect on isolated nodes. Experiments with two MLS datasets of typical urban scenes in Paris and Hong Kong were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Nine and eleven different object classes were recognized from these two datasets with overall accuracies of 97.13% and 95.79%, respectively, indicating the effectiveness of the proposed method of interpreting complex urban scenes from point clouds with large variations in point density. Compared with previous studies on the Paris dataset, our method was able to recognize more classes and obtained a mean F 1 -score of 72.70% of seven common classes, being higher than the best of previous results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plane detection and segmentation is one of the most crucial tasks in point cloud processing. The output from this process can be used as input for further processing steps, such as modelling, registration and calibration. However, the sparseness and heterogeneity of Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) point clouds may lead to problems for existing planar surfaces detection and segmentation methods. This paper proposes a new method that can be applicable to detect and segment planar features in sparse and heterogeneous MLS point clouds. This method utilises the scan profile patterns and the planarity values between different neighbouring scan profiles to detect and segment planar surfaces from MLS point clouds. The proposed method is compared to the three most state-of-the-art segmentation methods (e.g. RANSAC, a robust segmentation method based on robust statistics and diagnostic principal component analysis – RDCPA as well as the plane detection method based on line arrangement). Three datasets are used for the validation of the results. The results show that our proposed method outperforms the existing methods in detecting and segmenting planar surfaces in sparse and heterogeneous MLS point clouds. In some instances, the state-of-the-art methods produce incorrect segmentation results for façade details which have a similar orientation, such as for windows and doors within a façade. While RDCPA produces up to 50% of outliers depending on the neighbourhood threshold, another method could not detect such features at all. When dealing with small features such as a target, some algorithms (including RANSAC) were unable to perform segmentation. However, the propose algorithm was demonstrated to detect all planes in the test data sets correctly. The paper shows that these mis-segmentations in other algorithms may lead to significant errors in the registration process of between 1.047 and 1.614 degrees in the angular parameters, whereas the propose method had only resulted in 0.462 degree angular bias. Furthermore, it is not sensitive to the required method parameters as well as the point density of the point clouds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Direct use of point clouds to generate navigable graphs for pedestrians in urban environments. • Real routes generated according to two motor skills: pedestrians without reduced mobility and wheelchairs. • Navigable space based on ground elements and static objects. • Occlusion correction of sidewalks by applying morphological operations. Abstract Pathfinding applications for the citizen in urban environments are usually designed from the perspective of a driver, not being effective for pedestrians. In addition, urban scenes have multiple elements that interfere with pedestrian routes and navigable space. In this paper, a methodology for the direct use of point clouds for pathfinding in urban environments is presented, solving the main limitations for this purpose: (a) the excessive number of points is reduced for transformation into nodes on the final graph, (b) urban static elements acting as permanent obstacles, such as furniture and trees, are delimited and differentiated from dynamic elements such as pedestrians, (c) occlusions on ground elements are corrected to enable a complete graph modelling, and (d) navigable space is delimited from free unobstructed space according to two motor skills (pedestrians without reduced mobility and wheelchairs). The methodology is tested into three different streets sampled as point clouds by mobile laser scanning (MLS) systems: an intersection of several streets with ground composed of sidewalks at different heights; an avenue with wide sidewalks, trees and cars parked on one side; and a street with a single-lane road and narrow sidewalks. By applying Dijkstra pathfinding algorithm to the resulting graphs, the correct viability of the generated routes has been verified based on a visual analysis of the generated routes on the point cloud and on the knowledge of the urban study area. The methodology enables the automatic generation of graphs representing the navigable urban space, on which safe and real routes for different motor skills can be calculated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Surveys of roadways with Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) are now being conducted on a regular basis by many transportation agencies to provide detailed geometric information to support a wide range of applications, including asset management. Most MLS systems provide intensity (return signal strength) data as a point attribute in georeferenced point clouds, which may be used to estimate retro -reflectivity of pavement markings for effective maintenance. Nevertheless, the extraction of pavement markings from mobile lidar data remains an open challenge, due to variable noise, degree of wear on the markings, and road conditions. This paper addresses these challenges, presenting a novel approach for efficient, reliable extraction of lane markings, including those that have been significantly worn. First, using the MLS trajectory information, the lidar data is discretized into smaller sections, and then transformed to the local coordinate system, such that the road surface is near-horizontal for reliable extraction on roads with significant grade. Subsequently, the road surface is extracted using the constrained Random Sampling and Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm and then rasterized into a 2D intensity image to apply image processing techniques, namely: image segmentation to separate the lane markings from the road pavement, and a morphological opening operation to remove small objects. However, the extracted lane markings are prone to over-segmentation, due to occlusions or worn portions caused by moving vehicles. To rectify this, topologically-similar lane markings are associated with each other by computing line parameters (i.e., orientation and distance from the origin), which enables the gaps to be filled among the associated lanes. Finally, the remaining incorrect lane markings are detected and removed through a noise filtering phase using Dip test statistics. Examples of the effectiveness and application of the methodology are shown for a variety of sites with stripes of variable condition to highlight the robustness of the approach. Using optimized parameter values, the algorithm achieved F1 scores of 89–97% when tested on a variety of datasets encompassing a wide range of road scene types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate assessments of forest resources rely on ground truth data that are collected via in-situ measurements, which are fundamental for all other statistical- and/or remote-sensing-based deductions on quantified forest attributes. The major bottleneck of the current in-situ observation system is that the data collection is time consuming, and, thus, limited in extent, which potentially biases any further inferences made. Consequently, conventional field-data-collection approaches can hardly keep pace with the coverage, scale and frequency required for contemporary and future forest inventories. In-situ measurements from mobile platforms seem to be a promising technique to solve this problem and are estimated at least 10 times faster than static techniques (e.g., terrestrial laser scanning, TLS) at the plot level. However, the mobile platforms are still at the very early stages of development, and it is unclear which three-dimensional (3D) forest measurements the mobile systems can provide and at what accuracy. This study presents a quantitative evaluation of the performance of mobile platforms in a variety of forest conditions and through a comparison with state-of-the-art static in-situ observations. Two mobile platforms were used to collect field data, where the same laser-scanning system was both mounted on top of a vehicle and wore by an operator. The static in-situ observation from TLS is used as a baseline for the evaluation. All point clouds involved were processed through the same processing chain and compared to conventional manual measurement. The evaluation results indicate that the mobile platforms can assess homogeneous forests as well as static observations, but they cannot yet assess heterogeneous forest as required by practical applications. The major challenge is twofold: mobile-data coverage and accuracy. Future research should focus on the robust registration techniques between strips, especially in complex forest conditions, since errors of data registration results in significant impacts on tree attributes estimation accuracy. In cases that the spatial inconstancy cannot be eliminated, attributes estimation in single strips, i.e., the multi-single-scan approach, is an alternative. Meanwhile, operator training deserves attention since the data quality from mobile platforms is partly determined by the operators’ selection of trajectory in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indoor building models are essential in many indoor applications. These models are composed of the primitives of the buildings, such as the ceilings, floors, walls, windows, and doors, but not the movable objects in the indoor spaces, such as furniture. This paper presents, for indoor environments, a novel semantic line framework-based modeling building method using backpacked laser scanning point cloud data. The proposed method first semantically labels the raw point clouds into the walls, ceiling, floor, and other objects. Then line structures are extracted from the labeled points to achieve an initial description of the building line framework. To optimize the detected line structures caused by furniture occlusion, a conditional Generative Adversarial Nets (cGAN) deep learning model is constructed. The line framework optimization model includes structure completion, extrusion removal, and regularization. The result of optimization is also derived from a quality evaluation of the point cloud. Thus, the data collection and building model representation become a united task-driven loop. The proposed method eventually outputs a semantic line framework model and provides a layout for the interior of the building. Experiments show that the proposed method effectively extracts the line framework from different indoor scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]