Automated extraction of ground surface along urban roads from mobile laser scanning point clouds

Extracting ground surface from high-density point clouds collected by Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems is of vital importance in urban planning and digital city mapping. This article proposes a novel approach for automated extraction of ground surface along urban roads from MLS point clouds. The approach, which was designed to handle both ordered and unordered MLS point clouds, consists of three key steps: constructing vertical profile from MLS point clouds along the vehicle trajectory; extracting candidate ground points using an adaptive alpha shapes algorithm; refining the candidate ground points with an elevation variance filter. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, experiments were conducted using two types of urban street-scene point clouds. The results reveal that the ground points can be detected with an error rate of as low as 1.9%, proving that our proposed method offers a promising solution for automated extraction of ground surface from MLS point clouds. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 24 June 2015 Accepted 28 October 2015