Detection of utility poles from noisy Point Cloud Data in Urban environments

In recent years 3D urban maps have become more common, thus providing complex point clouds that include diverse urban furniture such as pole-like objects. Utility poles detection in urban environment is of particular interest for electric utility companies in order to maintain an updated inventory for better planning and management. The present study develops an automatic method for the detection of utility poles from noisy point cloud data of Guayaquil - Ecuador, where many poles are located very close to buildings, which increases the difficulty of discriminating poles, walls, columns, fences and building corners. The proposed method applies a segmentation stage based on clustering with vertical voxels and a classification stage based on neural networks.