AUTOMATIC U-SHAPED GUTTER WITH LID EXTRACTION FROM MOBILE MAPPING SYSTEM

Abstract

 With the progress and spread of autonomous driving technology, the importance of autonomous driving maps has been increasing. A U-shaped gutter with a lid is one type of road edge in autonomous driving maps. Since the U-shaped gutter with a lid has poor characteristics in terms of shape, not only has it been difficult to be drawn automatically, but manual drawing has also been laborsome. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically extract the U-shaped gutter with a lid. Our method focuses on the holes of the lid, which enables us to extract the gutter from a scan-line of a Mobile Mapping System (MMS) LiDAR. Although there is a high possibility that a detected hole is an error given that the hole is very small, our method, which utilizes the property that lids are aligned at equal intervals, achieves good accuracy. In our experiment in a real-world environment, the extraction accuracy of U-shaped gutters with a lid is 81.2%. Since not only the accuracy is high but also the processing time is realistic, we believe that our method can be an actual solution to improve the efficiency in producing autonomous driving maps. As a result, manual mapping is automated, and the labor and cost required for mapping can be expected to be reduced.