3D road surface reconstruction based on point clouds data assimilation algorithm

Urban areas 3D model reconstruction is one of the major fields of application of 3D scanning technologies. In the future, vehicle-based laser scanning, here called mobile laser scanning system, should see considerable use for 3D road environment modelling in urban areas. In this context, one of the main limitations perceived by the mobile laser scanning system is the incompleteness of the sampling. Whenever we scan urban area road environment, the produced sampling usually presents a large number of missing regions. Many algorithmic solutions exist to close those gaps from specific hole filling algorithms to the drastic solution of using water-tight reconstruction methods. In this paper, a method for filling holes of road surface point clouds and generating 3D model of road surface from mobile laser scanning data is developed. The data is classified into road surface, on-road and off-road surface point clouds. Many large holes in the road surface point clouds are filled by using data assimilation algorithm. Then, the road surface is 3D modeled as a triangulated irregular network. It is shown that the whole road surface 3D model is integrated after data processing. The above mentioned steps are applied to a large set of mobile laser scanning data of urban area road environment, in order to obtain the whole urban road surface 3D model