Automatic Assessment of Road Parameters Based on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping and Point Cloud Spatial Features

Road width and vertical clearance are important road parameters for transportation planning and infrastructure assessment. However, traditional manual measurement methods are time-consuming and dangerous. To solve these problems, an automatic assessment method for obtaining road parameters based on simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and point cloud spatial features is proposed. SLAM is used to reconstruct the three-dimensional (3D) point cloud map in real time. A fast extraction method of road boundary and vertical clearance calculation area based on 3D point cloud spatial features is proposed, and the width and vertical clearance of the road are evaluated. The proposed method is tested on the road section. The field test results show that the proposed method can achieve real-time reconstruction of the site point cloud map. The road boundary and vertical clearance area are accurately extracted, and the road width and vertical clearance are calculated with a computation efficiency of 2.113 s per 100 m. The average relative error between the ground truth and the calculation results is 1.02% for the road width and 0.76% for the vertical clearance.