Multi-view manhole detection, recognition, and 3D localisation

Abstract

Our work addresses the problem of accurately 3D localising specific types of road fixtures, such as manhole covers. The surveying task for manholes has to be done for millions of kilometres of road. We propose an efficient pipeline that starts from images captured by vans, which are then used to detect, recognise and localise the manholes. Challenges come from frequent occlusions, regular changes in illumination conditions, substantial viewpoint variance, and the fact that the actual manhole covers are far less similar than one might expect. We combine 2D and 3D techniques and demonstrate high performance for large amounts of image data. To our knowledge this is the first published work for manhole mapping based solely on computer vision techniques and GPS.