A novel approach to extracting street lamps from vehicle-borne laser data

The role of laser scanning technology in data collection and virtual environment modeling has been long recognized, especially for vehicle-borne laser scanning system (VBLS) which consists of a vehicle equipped with laser range scanners, CCD cameras and positioning devices. Up to now, most researches on vehicle-borne laser data are focused on the extractions of buildings, trees, etc., in correspondence with that on airborne LiDAR data. In this paper, instead, extraction of street lamps becomes our objective and a novel approach is proposed to fulfill it. An experiment is conducted to validate the proposed approach. Comparing with the images collected by the VBLS and real scenario observed from field work, the result indicates that the proposed approach is valid for extracting street lamps in terms of the accuracy of positioning and modeling ground targets.