Good afternoon TBC’ers! Have you ever wanted to be able to easily extract the poles within your point cloud dataset? Well, today I will be demonstrating the new automatic pole batch extraction workflow in TBC v5.30. Prior to extracting poles from your scan data, load in the global features FXL (or a feature library of your own) file from your project settings:
I recommend classifying your point cloud with the classify regions tool (under the point cloud ribbon) prior to pole extraction to aid the software in pole detection:
Next, from the point clouds ribbon, navigate to the extract point feature command under deliverables:
Within the extract point feature command pane, change the extraction type to pole and select automatic. You can open the automatic pole extraction settings to enter in a minimum pole height. This newly enhanced feature will allow the software to exclude poles that fall below your specified height during the feature extraction:
You can also add in a global feature code to assign pole attributes since we loaded in our global features FXL file prior to running the extraction. Adding a feature code will make our pole diameters and height editable after the extraction:
Once our input settings are changed, we can hit the extract pole attributes button to run the pole batch extraction:
When the pole extraction is complete, we can perform a quality assurance check in the 3D view. A travelling salesman path appears in green to simplify the QA/ QC process. The travelling salesman path allows us to validate each extracted pole individually:
We can zoom into a pole that we want to start the QA/ QC process on and mark it so we know when we have completed the QA/ QC loop. A pole will change from pink to white to indicate that we have marked it:
We can continue making our way around the travelling salesman path with the left and right key buttons (1). We can block out surrounding noise with the limit box to provide a clearer view of an individual pole (2). The button all the way to the right turns the travelling salesman path on and off (3):
After matching the attributes from our feature code to attributes we are extracting - in this case pole diameter and pole height - we can manually adjust the pole diameter and height by highlighting the pole diameter or height box, then coming back to the 3D view to measure a new value:
We can also hit the ignore button if the extract point feature command misclassified an object or noise as a pole:
Once all of our poles are validated, we can hit the add button at the bottom of the extract point feature command pane.
I hope this tip comes in handy next time you are looking to extract features from your point cloud data!