Automated traffic sign and light pole detection in mobile LiDAR scanning data

Detection of traffic signs and light poles using light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data has demonstrated a valid contribution to road safety improvements. In this study, the authors propose a fast and reliable method, which can identify various traffic signs and light poles in mobile LiDAR data. Specifically, they first use the surface reconstruction algorithm to extract the normal vectors of the points as one of the characteristic features and apply k-means on the characteristic features of the points to automatically segment the data into road or non-road points. They then employ sliding cuboids to search for high-elevated objects that are located near the borders and on top of the road points. They further employ the random sample consensus algorithm to remove outliers and keep the points that fall on the perpendicular planes to the road trajectory. Finally, they introduce a modified seeded region growing algorithm to remove noisy points and incorporate the shape information to reject the false objects. A set of extensive experiments have been carried out on the datasets that are captured by Utah Department of Transportation from I-15 highway. The results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method in detecting almost all traffic signs and light poles.