A Content-Adaptive Hierarchical Deep Learning Model for Detecting Arbitrary-Oriented Road Surface Elements Using MLS Point Clouds

Accurate and automatic detection of road surface element (such as road marking or manhole cover) information is the basis and key to many applications. To efficiently obtain the information of road surface element, we propose a content-adaptive hierarchical deep learning model to detect arbitrary-oriented road surface elements from mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds. In the model, we design a densely connected feature integration module (DCFM) to connect and reorganize feature maps of each stage in the backbone network. Besides, we propose a hierarchical prediction module (HPM) to innovatively use the reorganized feature maps to recognize different types of road surface elements, and thus, semantic information of road surface element can be adaptively expressed on multilevel feature maps. We also add a cascade structure (CS) in the head of model to detect the target efficiently, which can learn the offset between the predicted minimum bounding box of road surface element and ground truth. In experiments, we prove that the proposed method mainly contributed by HPM can maintain robust detection performance, even in the cases of unbalanced category number or overlapping of road surface elements. The experiments also prove that the proposed DCFM can improve the recognition effects of small targets. The CS for predicting boundary offset can detect each target more accurately. We also integrate the designed modules into some rotation detectors, e.g., the EAST and R3Det, and achieve the state-of-the-art results in three road scenes with different categories and uneven distribution of road surface elements, which further shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.