KALMAN FILTER BASED RAILWAY TRACKING FROM MOBILE LIDAR DATA

Abstract. This study introduces a new method to reconstruct 3D model of railway tracks from a railway corridor scene captured by mobile LiDAR data. The proposed approach starts to approximate the orientation of railway track trajectory from LiDAR point clouds and extract a strip, which direction is orthogonal to the trajectory of railway track. Within the strip, a track region and its track points are detected based on the Bayesian decision process. Once the main track region is localized, rail head points are segmented based on the region growing approach from the detected track points and then initial track models are reconstructed using a third-degree polynomial function. Based on the initial modelling result, a potential track region with varying lengths is dynamically predicted and the model parameters are updated in the Kalman Filter framework. The key aspect is that the proposed approach is able to enhance the efficiency of the railway tracking process by reducing the complexity for detecting track points and reconstructing track models based on the use of the track model previously reconstructed. An evaluation of the proposed method is performed over an urban railway corridor area containing multiple railway track pairs.