MACHINE LEARNING FOR MOBILE LIDAR DATA CLASSIFICATION OF 3D ROAD ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

3D road mapping is essential for intelligent transportation system in smart cities. Road features can be utilized for road maintenance, autonomous driving vehicles, and providing regulations to drivers. Currently, 3D road environment receives its data from Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems. MLS systems are capable of rapidly acquiring dense and accurate 3D point clouds, which allow for effective surveying of long road corridors. They produce huge amount of point clouds, which requires automatic features classification algorithms with acceptable processing time. Road features have variant geometric regular or irregular shapes. Therefore, most researches focus on classification of one road feature such as road surface, curbs, building facades, etc. Machine learning (ML) algorithms are widely used for predicting the future or classifying information to help policymakers in making necessary decisions. This prediction comes from a pre-trained model on a given data consisting of inputs and their corresponding outputs of the same characteristics. This research uses ML algorithms for mobile LiDAR data classification. First, cylindrical neighbourhood selection method was used to define point’s surroundings. Second, geometric point features including geometric, moment and height features were derived. Finally, three ML algorithms, Random Forest (RF), Gaussian Naïve Bayes (GNB), and Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (QDA) were applied. The ML algorithms were used to classify a part of Paris-Lille-3D benchmark of about 1.5 km long road in Lille with more than 98 million points into nine classes. The results demonstrated an overall accuracy of 92.39%, 78.5%, and 78.1% for RF, GNB, and QDA, respectively.