2022, Meyer, Jonas, Blaser, Stefan, Nebiker, Stephan

In this paper we present an edge-based hardware and software framework for the 3D detection and mapping of parked vehicles on a mobile mapping platform for the use case of on-street parking statistics. First, we investigate different point cloud-based 3D object detection methods on our extremely dense and noisy depth maps obtained from low-cost RGB-D sensors to find a suitable object detector and determine the optimal preparation of our data. We then retrain the chosen object detector to detect all types of vehicles, rather than standard cars only. Finally, we design and develop a software framework integrating the newly trained object detector. By repeating the parking statistics of our previous work (Nebiker et al., 2021), our software is tested regarding the detection accuracy. With our edge-based framework, we achieve a precision and recall of 100% and 98% respectively on any parking configuration and vehicle type, outperforming all other known work on on-street parking statistics. Furthermore, our software is evaluated in terms of processing speed and volume of generated data. While the processing speed reaches only 1.9 frames per second due to limited computing resources, the amount of data generated is just 0.25 KB per frame.

2021, Nebiker, Stephan, Meyer, Jonas, Blaser, Stefan, Ammann, Manuela, Rhyner, Severin Eric

A successful application of low-cost 3D cameras in combination with artificial intelligence (AI)-based 3D object detection algorithms to outdoor mobile mapping would offer great potential for numerous mapping, asset inventory, and change detection tasks in the context of smart cities. This paper presents a mobile mapping system mounted on an electric tricycle and a procedure for creating on-street parking statistics, which allow government agencies and policy makers to verify and adjust parking policies in different city districts. Our method combines georeferenced red-green-blue-depth (RGB-D) imagery from two low-cost 3D cameras with state-of-the-art 3D object detection algorithms for extracting and mapping parked vehicles. Our investigations demonstrate the suitability of the latest generation of low-cost 3D cameras for real-world outdoor applications with respect to supported ranges, depth measurement accuracy, and robustness under varying lighting conditions. In an evaluation of suitable algorithms for detecting vehicles in the noisy and often incomplete 3D point clouds from RGB-D cameras, the 3D object detection network PointRCNN, which extends region-based convolutional neural networks (R-CNNs) to 3D point clouds, clearly outperformed all other candidates. The results of a mapping mission with 313 parking spaces show that our method is capable of reliably detecting parked cars with a precision of 100% and a recall of 97%. It can be applied to unslotted and slotted parking and different parking types including parallel, perpendicular, and angle parking.

2018, Blaser, Stefan, Cavegn, Stefan, Nebiker, Stephan

The rapid progression in digitalization in the construction industry and in facility management creates an enormous demand for the efficient and accurate reality capturing of indoor spaces. Cloud-based services based on georeferenced metric 3D imagery are already extensively used for infrastructure management in outdoor environments. The goal of our research is to enable such services for indoor applications as well. For this purpose, we designed a portable mobile mapping research platform with a strong focus on acquiring accurate 3D imagery. Our system consists of a multi-head panorama camera in combination with two multi-profile LiDAR scanners and a MEMS-based industrial grade IMU for LiDAR-based online and offline SLAM. Our modular implementation based on the Robot Operating System enables rapid adaptations of the sensor configuration and the acquisition software. The developed workflow provides for completely GNSS-independent data acquisition and camera pose estimation using LiDAR-based SLAM. Furthermore, we apply a novel image-based georeferencing approach for further improving camera poses. First performance evaluations show an improvement from LiDAR-based SLAM to image-based georeferencing by an order of magnitude: from 10–13 cm to 1.3–1.8 cm in absolute 3D point accuracy and from 8–12 cm to sub-centimeter in relative 3D point accuracy.