System for semi-automated surveying of street-lighting poles from street-level panoramic images

Accurate and up-to-date inventories of lighting poles are of interest to energy companies, beneficial for the transition to energy-efficient lighting and may contribute to a more adequate lighting of streets. This potentially improves social security and reduces crime and vandalism during nighttime. This paper describes a system for automated surveying of lighting poles from street-level panoramic images. The system consists of two independent detectors, focusing at the detection of the pole itself and at the detection of a specific lighting fixture type. Both follow the same approach, and start with detection of the feature of interest (pole or fixture) within the individual images, followed by a multi-view analysis to retrieve the real-world coordinates of the poles. Afterwards, the detection output of both algorithms is merged. Large-scale validations, covering about 135 km of road, show that over 91% of the lighting poles is found, while the precision remains above 50%. When applying this system in a semi-automated fashion, high-quality inventories can be created up to 5 times more efficiently compared to manually surveying all poles from the images.