A successful application of low-cost 3D cameras in combination with artificial intelligence (AI)-based 3D object detection algorithms to outdoor mobile mapping would offer great potential for numerous mapping, asset inventory, and change detection tasks in the context of smart cities. This paper presents a mobile mapping system mounted on an electric tricycle and a procedure for creating on-street parking statistics, which allow government agencies and policy makers to verify and adjust parking policies in different city districts. Our method combines georeferenced red-green-blue-depth (RGB-D) imagery from two low-cost 3D cameras with state-of-the-art 3D object detection algorithms for extracting and mapping parked vehicles. Our investigations demonstrate the suitability of the latest generation of low-cost 3D cameras for real-world outdoor applications with respect to supported ranges, depth measurement accuracy, and robustness under varying lighting conditions. In an evaluation of suitable algorithms for detecting vehicles in the noisy and often incomplete 3D point clouds from RGB-D cameras, the 3D object detection network PointRCNN, which extends region-based convolutional neural networks (R-CNNs) to 3D point clouds, clearly outperformed all other candidates. The results of a mapping mission with 313 parking spaces show that our method is capable of reliably detecting parked cars with a precision of 100% and a recall of 97%. It can be applied to unslotted and slotted parking and different parking types including parallel, perpendicular, and angle parking.

The field of visual localization has been researched for several decades and has meanwhile found many practical applications. Despite the strong progress in this field, there are still challenging situations in which established methods fail. We present an approach to significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of established visual localization methods by adding rendered images. In detail, we first use a modern visual SLAM approach that provides a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based map to create reference data. We demonstrate that enriching reference data with images rendered from 3DGS at randomly sampled poses significantly improves the performance of both geometry-based visual localization and Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) methods. Through comprehensive evaluation in a large industrial environment, we analyze the performance impact of incorporating these additional rendered views.

The effective management of municipal road infrastructure requires up-to-date, standardized and reliable condition information to support sustainable maintenance. While visual road-condition assessment methods based on established standards are widely applied to municipal roads, they remain largely manual, time-consuming, costly and subjective. This study presents an end-to-end workflow for the automated visual inspection and condition assessment of municipal road infrastructure using high-resolution, 3D street-level imagery acquired by professional mobile mapping systems. The proposed approach integrates an efficient preprocessing pipeline for precise road-surface extraction with deep learning models trained for the specific task and an advanced postprocessing method for robust results aggregation. For this purpose, a large dataset covering approximately 352 km of municipal roads across eight municipalities was created by combining street-level imagery with expert-annotated road-condition index (RCI) values. Two neural network variants were implemented: a regression model predicting standardized RCI values and a binary classifier distinguishing between roads requiring maintenance and those in good condition. To ensure decision-oriented outputs at the infrastructure-asset level, frame-based predictions are aggregated into homogeneous road segments using outlier detection and change-point analysis along the road axis. The regression model achieved a mean absolute error of 0.48 RCI values at frame level and 0.40 RCI values at road-segment level, outperforming conventional inter-expert variability, while the binary classification model reached an F1-score of 0.85. These findings demonstrate that AI-based visual road-condition assessment using professional mobile mapping data can provide accurate, standardized and scalable condition information for municipal road infrastructure. The proposed workflow supports maintenance prioritization and infrastructure management decisions without requiring explicit detection of individual pavement defects, offering a practical pathway toward automated, cost-effective road-condition monitoring.

The field of visual localization has been researched for several decades and has meanwhile found many practical applications. Despite the strong progress in this field, there are still challenging situations in which established methods fail. We present an approach to significantly improve the accuracy and reliability of established visual localization methods by adding rendered images. In detail, we first use a modern visual SLAM approach that provides a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) based map to create reference data. We demonstrate that enriching reference data with images rendered from 3DGS at randomly sampled poses significantly improves the performance of both geometry-based visual localization and Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) methods. Through comprehensive evaluation in a large industrial environment, we analyze the performance impact of incorporating these additional rendered views.