Extraction and Classification of Road Markings Using Mobile Laser Scanning Point Clouds

This study aims at building a robust method for semiautomated information extraction of pavement markings detected from mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds. The proposed workflow consists of three components: 1) preprocessing, 2) extraction, and 3) classification. In preprocessing, the three-dimensional (3-D) MLS point clouds are converted into radiometrically corrected and enhanced two-dimensional (2-D) intensity imagery of the road surface. Then, the pavement markings are automatically extracted with the intensity using a set of algorithms, including Otsu's thresholding, neighbor-counting filtering, and region growing. Finally, the extracted pavement markings are classified with the geometric parameters by using a manually defined decision tree. A study was conducted by using the MLS dataset acquired in Xiamen, Fujian, China. The results demonstrated that the proposed workflow and method can achieve 92% in completeness, 95% in correctness, and 94% in F-score.