A novel direct approach for highway design and visualization based on LIDAR

Existing research suggests that LIDAR data is best suited for providing highway designers with general terrain information early in the location process in order to identify final corridors where more intensive photogrammetric work can be performed. The LIDAR points cloud is adopted to produce the digital terrain models (DTM) and digital orthophoto map (DOM) to aid the professional designers´ work. In this paper, we propose a novel direct approach for highway design and visualization based on LIDAR point cloud. This approach omits the procedure of DTM and DOM, and automatically generates the 3D profile and cross sections by using LIDAR points cloud only. The visualization of highway corridors is also quickly achieved by triangulation and texture mapping of the LIDAR points cloud.