Automated extraction of street-scene objects from mobile lidar point clouds

Mobile laser scanning or lidar is a new and rapid system to capture high-density three-dimensional (3-D) point clouds. Automatic data segmentation and feature extraction are the key steps for accurate identification and 3-D reconstruction of street-scene objects (e.g. buildings and trees). This article presents a novel method for automated extraction of street-scene objects from mobile lidar point clouds. The proposed method first uses planar division to sort points into different grids, then calculates the weights of points in each grid according to the spatial distribution of mobile lidar points and generates the geo-referenced feature image of the point clouds using the inverse-distance-weighted interpolation method. Finally, the proposed method transforms the extraction of street-scene objects from 3-D mobile lidar point clouds into the extraction of geometric features from two-dimensional (2-D) imagery space, thus simplifying the automated object extraction process. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides a promising solution for automatically extracting street-scene objects from mobile lidar point clouds.