Urban Three-dimensional (3-D) Road Surface Reconstruction Based on a Data Assimilation Algorithm Using a Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) System
D. Chen and X. He
Urban area three-dimensional (3-D) model reconstruction is one of the major fields of application of 3-D scanning technologies. In the future, vehicle-based laser scanning, here called mobile laser scanning system, should see considerable use for 3-D road environment modelling in urban areas. In this context one of the main limitations perceived by the mobile laser scanning system is the incompleteness of the sampling. Whenever we scan urban area road environment, the produced sampling usually presents a large number of missing regions. Many algorithmic solutions exist to close those gaps from specific hole filling algorithms to the drastic solution of using water-tight reconstruction methods. In this paper, a method for filling holes of road surface point clouds and generating 3-D model of road surface from mobile laser scanning data is developed. The data is classified into road surface, on-road and off-road surface point clouds. Many large holes in the road surface point clouds are filled by using data assimilation algorithm. Then, the road surface is 3-D modelled as a triangulated irregular network. It is shown that the whole road surface 3-D model is integrated after data processing. The above mentioned steps are applied to a large set of mobile laser scanning data of urban area road environment, in order to obtain the whole urban road surface 3-D model.
Keywords: Mobile laser scanning (MLS), three-dimensional (3-D), road surface, modelling, point cloud processing