Smart fusion of mobile laser scanner data with large scale topographic maps

The classification of Mobile Laser Scanner (MLS) data is challenging due to the combination of high variation in point density with a high variation of object appearances. The way how objects appear in the MLS data highly depends on the speed and orientation of the mobile mapping platform and the occlusion by other vehicles. There have been many approaches dealing with the geometric and contextual appearance of MLS points, voxels and segments to classify the MLS data. We present a completely different strategy by fusing the MLS data with a large scale topographic map. Underlying assumption is that the map delivers a clear hint on what to expect in the MLS data, at its approximate location. The approach presented here first fuses polygon objects, such as road, water, terrain and buildings, with ground and non-ground MLS points. Non-ground MLS points above roads and terrain are further classified by segmenting and matching the laser points to corresponding map point objects. The segmentation parameters depend on the class of the map points. We show that the fusion process is capable of classifying MLS data and detecting changes between the map and MLS data. The segmentation algorithm is not perfect, at some occasions not all the MLS points are correctly assigned to the corresponding map object. However, it is without doubt that the proposed map fusion delivers a very rich labelled point cloud automatically, which in future work can be used as training data in deep learning approaches.