Automated visibility field evaluation of traffic sign based on 3D lidar point clouds

Abstract

Maintaining high visibility of traffic signs is very important for traffic safety. Manual inspection and removal of occlusion in front of traffic signs is one of the daily tasks of the traffic management department. This paper presents a method that can automatically detect the occlusion and continuously quantitative estimate the visibility of traffic sign cover all the road surface based on Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems. The concept of traffic sign's visibility field is proposed in this paper. One of important innovation of this paper is that we use retinal imaging area to evaluate the visibility of a traffic sign. And this makes our method is in line with human vision. To validate the reasonable and accuracy of our method, we use the 2D and 3D registration technology to observe the consistence of the occlusion ratio in point clouds with it in photo. Experiment of implementation on large scale traffic environments show that our method is feasible and efficient.