Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) point cloud data contains rich three-dimensional (3D) information on road ancillary facilities such as street lamps, traffic signs and utility poles. Automatically recognizing such information from point cloud would provide benefits for road safety inspection, ancillary facilities management and so on, and can also provide basic information support for the construction of an information city. This paper presents a method for extracting and classifying pole-like objects (PLOs) from unstructured MLS point cloud data. Firstly, point cloud is preprocessed to remove outliers, downsample and filter ground points. Then, the PLOs are extracted from the point cloud by spatial independence analysis and cylindrical or linear feature detection. Finally, the PLOs are automatically classified by 3D shape matching. The method was tested based on two point clouds with different road environments. The completeness, correctness and overall accuracy were 92.7%, 97.4% and 92.3% respectively in Data I. For Data II, that provided by International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Working Group (ISPRS WG) III/5 was also used to test the performance of the method, and the completeness, correctness and overall accuracy were 90.5%, 97.1% and 91.3%, respectively. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method can effectively extract and classify PLOs accurately and effectively, which also shows great potential for further applications of MLS point cloud data.

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The digital mapping of road environment is an important task for road infrastructure inventory and urban planning. Automatic extraction and classification of pole-like objects can remarkably reduce mapping cost and enhance work efficiency. Therefore, this paper proposes a voxel-based method that automatically extracts and classifies three-dimensional (3-D) pole-like objects by analyzing the spatial characteristics of objects. First, a voxel-based shape recognition is conducted to generate a set of pole-like object candidates. Second, according to their isolation and vertical continuity, the pole-like objects are detected and individualized using the proposed circular model with an adaptive radius and the vertical region growing algorithm. Finally, several semantic rules, consisting of shape features and spatial topological relationships, are derived for further classifying the extracted pole-like objects into four categories (i.e., lamp posts, utility poles, tree trunks, and others). The proposed method was evaluated using three datasets from mobile LiDAR point cloud data. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently extracted the pole-like objects from the three datasets, with extraction rates of 85.3%, 94.1%, and 92.3%. Moreover, the proposed method can achieve robust classificationresults, especially for classifying tree trunks.

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The occurrence of drought is a complex process and is caused by the interaction of multiple drought-causing factors. The construction of traditional drought models and indexes seldom considers multiple drought-causing factors. This study integrated the precipitation, soil water and heat balance, and crop growth during drought. From the beginning of the process of agricultural drought, the atmosphere, soil, and crops that characterize drought are considered, through the principal component analysis method to construct a comprehensive drought monitoring index (CDMI). This index was verified by using the areas covered by drought, areas affected by drought, relative soil moisture, and crop yield. The annual average CDMI had negative correlations with areas covered and affected by drought. The correlation coefficients were -0.68 and -0.73. Moreover, the CDMI value had positive correlations with relative soil moisture and crop yield. The maximum correlation coefficient between CDMI and relative soil moisture was 0.91, and the correlation coefficient with maize yield was 0.52. Subsequently, the CDMI was applied to long-term drought monitoring in agricultural areas during the summer maize growing season (June to September) in Henan Province. Results showed that the most severe years of agricultural drought in

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