Title
Automatic Extraction of Railroad Centerlines from Mobile Laser Scanning Data
Abstract
In this paper, we describe the automatic extraction of centerlines of railroads. Mobile Laser Scanning systems are able to capture the 3D environment of the rail tracks with a high level of detail. Our approach first detects laser points that were reflected by the rail tracks, by making use of local properties such as parallelism and height in relation to neighboring objects. In the modeling stage, we present two approaches to determine the centerline location. The first approach generates center points in a data-driven manner by projecting rail track points to the parallel track, and taking the midpoint as initial center point. Next, a piecewise linear function is fitted through the center points to generate center points at a regular interval. The second approach models the rail track by fitting piecewise 3D track models to the rail track points. The model consists of a pair of two parallel rail tracks. The fitted pieces are smoothened by a Fourier series interpolation function. After that the centerline is implicitly determined by the geometric center of the pair of tracks. Reference data has been used to analyze the quality of our results, confirming that the position of the centerlines can be determined with an accuracy of 2-3 cm.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.3390/rs70505565
REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
Field
DocType
rail tracks,point clouds
Reference data (financial markets),Computer vision,Midpoint,Level of detail,Track (rail transport),Artificial intelligence,Geology,Point cloud,Piecewise linear function,3D modeling,Piecewise
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
7
5
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.55
8
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sander Oude Elberink155831.48
Kourosh Khoshelham26512.67