Remote Sensing, Vol. 11, Pages 2929: An Efficient and Accurate Method for Different Configurations Railway Extraction Based on Mobile Laser Scanning (Remote Sensing)

The precision of railway map is becoming a significant issue for autonomous train scheduling, monitoring and maintenance, related location-based service (LBS), and further ensuring travel safety. Mobile 3D laser scanning is an efficient method for making relative high-precision railway track maps, particularly during the night period of railway maintenance, for light detection and ranging (LiDAR) can work without ambient light. In this paper, we propose an efficient and accurate railway track vectorization method based on the LiDAR point clouds from the self-built train Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) system. Our method takes full use of railway track geometry and reflection intensity feature of LiDAR, without any trajectory prior information. Firstly, clear track points are filtered by intensity; then, a K-means clustering fused Region-Grow Fitting algorithm is applied. It can not only extract the line vector of railway track, but also can tell the track branches apart, especially on bends and turnout. Experiments were carried on using point clouds with an average density of 490 points per square meter. The experimental results show that the method not only can quickly extract linear objects such as railway track and catenary, but also can detect the railways even in complex real-world topologies such as at bends and turnouts. The precision of the detection area in bends and turnouts are 90.32% and 81.31% respectively, the sensitivity is 83.27% and 83.33%, respectively. Moreover, it can identify the track networks.