Feasibility of extracting highway vertical profiles from LiDAR data

Producing as-built drawings is an important task in any road construction project. In fact, in an ideal situation, these drawings must be updated whenever major maintenance work takes place. Unfortunately, constantly updating those drawings is not always feasible due to the amount of manual work associated with the data collection in traditional surveying practice. The increase in computing power and the advancement in technology has led many transportation agencies to consider utilizing remote sensing techniques to extract roadway design features and prepare as-builts of roads. In this note, a procedure to generate as-built drawings of vertical profiles on highways using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point cloud data are proposed. The procedure is a multistep procedure where the road centerline of each segment is first defined, after that a best fit alignment of points along the road’s centerline is generated. A digital surface model (DSM) of the LiDAR highway is created and the centerline is relay...