Mobile laser scanning (MLS, or mobile lidar) is a 3-D data acquisition technique that has been widely used in a variety of applications in recent years due to its high accuracy and efficiency. However, given the large data volume and complexity of the point clouds, processing MLS data can be still challenging with respect to effectiveness, efficiency, and versatility.
This paper proposes an efficient MLS data processing framework for general purposes consisting of three main steps: trajectory reconstruction, scan pattern grid generation, and Mo-norvana (Mobile Normal Variation Analysis) segmentation. We present a novel approach to reconstructing the scanner trajectory, which can then be used to structure the point cloud data into a scan pattern grid. By exploiting the scan pattern grid, point cloud segmentation can be performed using Mo-norvana, which is developed based on our previous work for processing Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) data, normal variation analysis (Norvana).
In this work, with an unorganized MLS point cloud as input, the proposed framework can complete various tasks that may be desired in many applications including trajectory reconstruction, data structuring, data visualization, edge detection, feature extraction, normal estimation, and segmentation.
The performance of the proposed procedures are experimentally evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively using multiple MLS datasets via the results of trajectory reconstruction, visualization, and segmentation. The efficiency of the proposed method is demonstrated to be able to handle a large dataset stably with a fast computation speed (about 1 million pts/sec. with 8 threads) by taking advantage of parallel programming.
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