| Recent advances in Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) technology and integration have resulted in vehicle-borne platforms for urban LIDAR scanning, such as Terrapoint Inc.'s TITAN® system. Such technology has lead to an explosion in ground LIDAR data. The large size of such mobile urban LIDAR data sets, and the ease at which they may now be collected, has shifted the bottleneck of creating abstract urban models for Geographical Information Systems (GIS) from data collection to data processing. While turning such data into useful models has traditionally relied on human analysis, this is no longer practical. This thesis outlines a methodology for automatically recovering the necessary information to create abstract urban models from mobile urban LIDAR data using computer vision methods. As an integral part of the methodology, a novel scale-based interest operator is introduced (Difference of Normals) that is efficient enough to process large datasets, while accurately isolating objects of interest in the scene according to real-world parameters. Finally a novel localized object recognition algorithm is introduced (Local Potential Well Space Embedding), derived from a proven global method for object recognition (Potential Well Space Embedding). The object recognition phase of our methodology is discussed with these two algorithms as a focus. |
