A Method of Detecting Utility Poles by Analyzing 3D Point Cloud

Abstract

We have developed a new method of detecting utility poles in urban area by analyzing 3-dimensional point cloud acquired by the mobile mapping system (MMS). The MMS has laser sensors on its vehicle and surveys wide area using the sensors with driving in urban scenes. The output is point cloud, a large set of 3-dimensional points which represents 3-dimensional model of the area. Suppose a pole stands vertically in the scene, its measured points are located on its cylindrical surface. Therefore, if points gathered in a vertical cylindrical area, there must be a pole. In our method, such areas are searched by 3 steps, (1) projecting point cloud to a horizontal plane, (2) smoothing the projected pattern, and (3) matching it with the template which has a desired pattern of pole's projection. In this paper, we show our method and some experiments. Some extensions using ground filtering and the vehicle's locus are also introduced. In actual point cloud, poles are detected successively.