Road surface modeling and representation from point cloud based on fuzzy clustering

A scheme for an automatic road surface modeling from a noisy point cloud is presented. The normal vectors of the point cloud are estimated by distance-weighted fitting of local plane. Then, an automatic recognition of the road surface from noise is performed based on the fuzzy clustering of normal vectors, with which the mean value is calculated and the projecting plane of point cloud is created to obtain the geometric model accordingly. Based on fuzzy clustering of the intensity attributed to each point, different objects on the road surface are assigned different colors for representing abundant appearances. This unsupervised method is demonstrated in the experiment and shows great effectiveness in reconstructing and rendering better road surface.