Extraction of Road Edges from MMS Point Clouds Using Bend Angle of Scanline

Abstract

Efficient road edge extraction from point clouds acquired by Mobile Mapping System (MMS) is an important task because the road edge is one of the main elements of high definition maps. In this paper, we present a scanline-based road edge extraction method using a bend angle of scanlines from MMS point clouds. Scanline-based methods generally have advantages in that computational cost is low, it is easy to extract accurate road edges, and they are independent of driving speed of MMS compared to methods using unorganized points. In contrast, the extraction accuracy becomes low at curb cuts, intersections, and small occlusion parts from weeds and fallen leaves. In order to resolve these problems, we present a scanline-based road edge extraction method by calculation of bend angle by using filtered point clouds and tracking based on the bend angle of scanlines and smoothness of road edges. In the experiments, our proposed methods achieved a completeness, a correctness, and a quality of 92.9% to 99.5%, and accuracy of 10.5 mm to 19.6 mm in total. In addition, our proposed methods resulted in makes robustness against slight occlusions around curbs and specifications of MMS.