Automated Road Extraction and Centreline Fitting in LiDAR Point Clouds

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel, efficient method for extracting road centerlines from LiDAR point clouds by combining 3D and 2D processing, improving accuracy and processing time over existing techniques.

Contribution

The proposed approach reduces reliance on kerb design, integrates top-down view processing, and enhances road extraction accuracy with post-processing, advancing LiDAR-based road mapping.

Findings

Achieved 73% IoU in road extraction on Perth CBD dataset.

Reduced processing time by 23% with post-processing.

Demonstrated robustness across diverse road types and terrains.

Abstract

Road information extraction from 3D point clouds is useful for urban planning and traffic management. Existing methods often rely on local features and the refraction angle of lasers from kerbs, which makes them sensitive to variable kerb designs and issues in high-density areas due to data homogeneity. We propose an approach for extracting road points and fitting centrelines using a top-down view of LiDAR based ground-collected point clouds. This prospective view reduces reliance on specific kerb design and results in better road extraction. We first perform statistical outlier removal and density-based clustering to reduce noise from 3D point cloud data. Next, we perform ground point filtering using a grid-based segmentation method that adapts to diverse road scenarios and terrain characteristics. The filtered points are then projected onto a 2D plane, and the road is extracted by a skeletonisation algorithm. The skeleton is back-projected onto the 3D point cloud with calculated normals, which guide a region growing algorithm to find nearby road points. The extracted road points are then smoothed with the Savitzky-Golay filter to produce the final centreline. Our initial approach without post-processing of road skeleton achieved 67% in IoU by testing on the Perth CBD dataset with different road types. Incorporating the post-processing of the road skeleton improved the extraction of road points around the smoothed skeleton. The refined approach achieved a higher IoU value of 73% and with 23% reduction in the processing time. Our approach offers a generalised and computationally efficient solution that combines 3D and 2D processing techniques, laying the groundwork for future road reconstruction and 3D-to-2D point cloud alignment.