Pole-like objects, including trees, lampposts and traffic signs, are indispensable part of urban infrastructure. With the advance of vehicle-based laser scanning (VLS), massive point cloud of roadside urban areas becomes applied in 3D digital city modeling. Based on the property that different pole-like objects have various canopy parts and similar trunk parts, this paper proposed the 3D part-based shape analysis to robustly extract, identify and model the pole-like objects. The proposed method includes: 3D clustering and recognition of trunks, voxel growing and part-based 3D modeling. After preprocessing, the trunk center is identified as the point that has local density peak and the largest minimum inter-cluster distance. Starting from the trunk centers, the remaining points are iteratively clustered to the same centers of their nearest point with higher density. To eliminate the noisy points, cluster border is refined by trimming boundary outliers. Then, candidate trunks are extracted based on the clustering results in three orthogonal planes by shape analysis. Voxel growing obtains the completed pole-like objects regardless of overlaying. Finally, entire trunk, branch and crown part are analyzed to obtain seven feature parameters. These parameters are utilized to model three parts respectively and get signal part-assembled 3D model. The proposed method is tested using the VLS-based point cloud of Wuhan University, China. The point cloud includes many kinds of trees, lampposts and other pole-like posters under different occlusions and overlaying. Experimental results show that the proposed method can extract the exact attributes and model the roadside pole-like objects efficiently.
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