Pole-Like Road Object Detection in Mobile LiDAR Data via Supervoxel and Bag-of-Contextual-Visual-Words Representation

This letter addresses the problem of detecting pole-like road objects (including light poles and traffic signposts) from mobile light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data for transportation-related applications. The method consists of two consecutive stages: training and pole-like object detection. At the training stage, a contextual visual vocabulary is created from the feature regions generated from a training data set by supervoxel segmentation. At the pole-like object detection stage, a bag-of-contextual-visual-words representation is generated for each semantic object segmented from mobile LiDAR data. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves correctness, omission, and commission of 88.9%, 11.1%, and 2.8%, respectively, in detecting pole-like road objects. Computational complexity analysis demonstrates that our method provides a promising and effective solution to rapid and accurate detection of pole-like objects from large volumes of mobile LiDAR data.