Context-aware and boundary-optimized model for road marking instance segmentation using MLS point cloud intensity images

Accurate road marking extraction is essential for advancing digital transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, and high-definition maps. Although existing methods focus on extracting high-precision road markings from Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) point clouds, they still face challenges in practical...

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Main Authors: Dehui Li, Tao Liu, Ping Du, Tianen Ma, Shuangtong Liu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Taylor & Francis Group 2025-08-01
Series:International Journal of Digital Earth
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/17538947.2025.2531842
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author Dehui Li
Tao Liu
Ping Du
Tianen Ma
Shuangtong Liu
author_facet Dehui Li
Tao Liu
Ping Du
Tianen Ma
Shuangtong Liu
author_sort Dehui Li
collection DOAJ
description Accurate road marking extraction is essential for advancing digital transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, and high-definition maps. Although existing methods focus on extracting high-precision road markings from Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) point clouds, they still face challenges in practical applications, including indistinguishable instances, category ambiguity, and incomplete boundary segmentation, which collectively limit their overall performance. To address these challenges, we convert MLS point clouds into intensity images and propose a deep learning model that integrates context modelling and boundary refinement for accurate instance segmentation of road markings. First, a feature enhancement module (FEM) is designed to improve road marking representation by learning dependencies across channel and spatial dimensions. Second, a multiscale context-aware module (MSCAM) is constructed to enhance the model's capacity to identify diverse marking types by aggregating semantic information from multi-scale distant regions. Lastly, a PointRend module (PRM) is introduced to adaptively select key points for prediction, generating high-quality boundary masks. Experiments on a newly constructed dataset reveal that, compared with state-of-the-art instance segmentation models, our method offers substantial performance advantages. The model accurately detects and segments eight categories of road markings, achieving 77.1% APb and 59.8% APm on Test Set 1.
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institution Kabale University
issn 1753-8947
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language English
publishDate 2025-08-01
publisher Taylor & Francis Group
record_format Article
series International Journal of Digital Earth
spelling doaj-art-b4d15ac64b1f45a1be3b717747dc83a52025-08-25T11:31:54ZengTaylor & Francis GroupInternational Journal of Digital Earth1753-89471753-89552025-08-0118110.1080/17538947.2025.2531842Context-aware and boundary-optimized model for road marking instance segmentation using MLS point cloud intensity imagesDehui Li0Tao Liu1Ping Du2Tianen Ma3Shuangtong Liu4Faculty of Geomatics, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Lanzhou, People’s Republic of ChinaFaculty of Geomatics, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Lanzhou, People’s Republic of ChinaFaculty of Geomatics, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Lanzhou, People’s Republic of ChinaSchool of Marine Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of ChinaFaculty of Geomatics, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Lanzhou, People’s Republic of ChinaAccurate road marking extraction is essential for advancing digital transportation systems, autonomous vehicles, and high-definition maps. Although existing methods focus on extracting high-precision road markings from Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) point clouds, they still face challenges in practical applications, including indistinguishable instances, category ambiguity, and incomplete boundary segmentation, which collectively limit their overall performance. To address these challenges, we convert MLS point clouds into intensity images and propose a deep learning model that integrates context modelling and boundary refinement for accurate instance segmentation of road markings. First, a feature enhancement module (FEM) is designed to improve road marking representation by learning dependencies across channel and spatial dimensions. Second, a multiscale context-aware module (MSCAM) is constructed to enhance the model's capacity to identify diverse marking types by aggregating semantic information from multi-scale distant regions. Lastly, a PointRend module (PRM) is introduced to adaptively select key points for prediction, generating high-quality boundary masks. Experiments on a newly constructed dataset reveal that, compared with state-of-the-art instance segmentation models, our method offers substantial performance advantages. The model accurately detects and segments eight categories of road markings, achieving 77.1% APb and 59.8% APm on Test Set 1.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/17538947.2025.2531842Road markingsinstance segmentationmobile laser scanning (MLS) point cloudsboundary optimizedcontext-aware
spellingShingle Dehui Li
Tao Liu
Ping Du
Tianen Ma
Shuangtong Liu
Context-aware and boundary-optimized model for road marking instance segmentation using MLS point cloud intensity images
International Journal of Digital Earth
Road markings
instance segmentation
mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds
boundary optimized
context-aware
title Context-aware and boundary-optimized model for road marking instance segmentation using MLS point cloud intensity images
title_full Context-aware and boundary-optimized model for road marking instance segmentation using MLS point cloud intensity images
title_fullStr Context-aware and boundary-optimized model for road marking instance segmentation using MLS point cloud intensity images
title_full_unstemmed Context-aware and boundary-optimized model for road marking instance segmentation using MLS point cloud intensity images
title_short Context-aware and boundary-optimized model for road marking instance segmentation using MLS point cloud intensity images
title_sort context aware and boundary optimized model for road marking instance segmentation using mls point cloud intensity images
topic Road markings
instance segmentation
mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds
boundary optimized
context-aware
url https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/17538947.2025.2531842
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AT taoliu contextawareandboundaryoptimizedmodelforroadmarkinginstancesegmentationusingmlspointcloudintensityimages
AT pingdu contextawareandboundaryoptimizedmodelforroadmarkinginstancesegmentationusingmlspointcloudintensityimages
AT tianenma contextawareandboundaryoptimizedmodelforroadmarkinginstancesegmentationusingmlspointcloudintensityimages
AT shuangtongliu contextawareandboundaryoptimizedmodelforroadmarkinginstancesegmentationusingmlspointcloudintensityimages