Search

To improve the accuracy of wood and leaf points classification for individual tree, this paper proposed a separation method based on mode points evolution from terrestrial LiDAR point clouds. In the proposed method, the Mean Shift method was used to first acquire the mode points, which were then adopted as nodes to build a network graph for the individual tree. By path retracing and calculating the visiting frequency of each node, the wood seed nodes were detected. To obtain more wood nodes, the wood seed nodes were evolved based on three constraints, namely the shortest path length of the evolved nodes to the base node should be smaller, the evolved nodes should not belong to the leaf nodes that have been detected by path retracing and the verticality of the evolved nodes should be similar as the wood seed nodes. After wood nodes evolution, the segments corresponding to each wood seed node were merged together to obtain the final wood points. The proposed method has been evaluated using nine tree samples with seven different tree species. Experimental results showed that the proposed method can achieve an average wood and leaf classification accuracy of 0.892. The average F1 score for wood was 0.871, while the average F1 score for leaf was 0.900. Compared to two other famous wood and leaf classification methods, the proposed method can achieve better classification results.

Denoising is a key pre-processing step for many airborne LiDAR point cloud applications. However, the previous algorithms have a number of problems, which affect the quality of point cloud post-processing, such as DTM generation. In this paper, a novel automated denoising algorithm is proposed based on empirical mode decomposition to remove outliers from airborne LiDAR point cloud. Comparing with traditional point cloud denoising algorithms, the proposed method can detect outliers from a signal processing perspective. Firstly, airborne LiDAR point clouds are decomposed into a series of intrinsic mode functions with the help of morphological operations, which would significantly decrease the computational complexity. By applying OTSU algorithm to these intrinsic mode functions, noise-dominant components can be detected and filtered. Finally, outliers are detected automatically by comparing observed elevations and reconstructed elevations. Three datasets located at three different cities in China were used to verify the validity and robustness of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method removes both high and low outliers effectively with various terrain features while preserving useful ground details.

Filtering of ground points is a key step for most applications of airborne LiDAR point clouds. Although many filtering algorithms have been proposed in recent years, most of them suffer from parameter setting or thresholds fine-tuning. This is most often time-consuming and reduces the degree of automation of the applied algorithm. To overcome such problems, this paper proposes a threshold-free filtering algorithm based on expectation–maximization (EM). The filter is developed based on the assumption that point clouds are seen as a mixture of Gaussian models. Thus, the separation of ground points and non-ground points from point clouds is partitioning of the point clouds by a mixed Gaussian model that is used for screening ground points. EM is applied to realize the separation, which calculates the maximum likelihood estimates of the mixture parameters. Using the estimated parameters, the likelihoods of each point belonging to ground or non-ground are computed. Noticeably, point clouds are labeled as the component with a larger likelihood. The proposed method has been tested using the standard filtering datasets provided by the ISPRS. Experimental results showed that the proposed method performed the best in comparison with the classic progressive triangulated irregular network densification (PTD) and segment-based PTD methods in terms of omission error. The average omission error of the proposed method was 52.81% and 16.78% lower than the classic PTD method and the segment-based PTD method, respectively. Moreover, the proposed method was able to reduce its average total error by 31.95% compared to the classic PTD method.

Individual tree modeling for terrestrial LiDAR point clouds always involves heavy computation burden and low accuracy toward a complex tree structure. To solve these problems, this paper proposed a self-adaptive optimization individual tree modeling method. In this paper, we first proposed a joint neighboring growing method to segment wood points into object primitives. Subsequently, local object primitives were optimized to alleviate the computation burden. To build the topology relation among branches, branches were separated based on spatial connectivity analysis. And then the nodes corresponding to each object primitive were adopted to construct the graph structure of the tree. Furthermore, each object primitive was fitted as a cylinder. To revise the local abnormal cylinder, a self-adaptive optimization method based on the constructed graph structure was proposed. Finally, the constructed tree model was further optimized globally based on prior knowledge. Twenty-nine field datasets obtained from three forest sites were adopted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve satisfying individual tree modeling accuracy. The mean volume deviation of the proposed method is 1.427 m3. In the comparison with two other famous tree modeling methods, the proposed method can achieve the best individual tree modeling result no matter which accuracy indicator is selected.

Polarimetric synthetic aperture radar is an important technology for Earth observation. Generally, polarimetric calibration (PolCAL) should be performed before any quantitative applications. The reflection symmetric targets can relieve the dependence of PolCAL on calibrators. In this work, we use a helix-ratio feature to extract these targets. Through analysis, we find that the helix-ratio feature has a high tolerance to polarimetric distortions and is suitable for extracting samples in un-calibrated images for PolCAL. An adaptive segmentation algorithm is also developed to extract reflection symmetric targets automatically. Experiments with C- and X-band airborne images show that the extraction of reflection symmetric targets can improve the calibration accuracy of crosstalk. In addition, the proposed method can maintain the polarimetric signature of the targets in the calibration and can improve calibration performance when compared with other reflection symmetric target extraction methods.

Building extraction from airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) point clouds is a significant step in the process of digital urban construction. Although the existing building extraction methods perform well in simple urban environments, when encountering complicated city environments with irregular building shapes or varying building sizes, these methods cannot achieve satisfactory building extraction results. To address these challenges, a building extraction method from airborne LiDAR data based on multi-constraints graph segmentation was proposed in this paper. The proposed method mainly converted point-based building extraction into object-based building extraction through multi-constraints graph segmentation. The initial extracted building points were derived according to the spatial geometric features of different object primitives. Finally, a multi-scale progressive growth optimization method was proposed to recover some omitted building points and improve the completeness of building extraction. The proposed method was tested and validated using three datasets provided by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS). Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve the best building extraction results. It was also found that no matter the average quality or the average F1 score, the proposed method outperformed ten other investigated building extraction methods.

In recent years, many airborne point clouds filtering methods have been developed. However, it is still challenging for distinguishing ground and non-ground points in forested areas due to the rugged terrains, dense vegetation canopy and low-level penetration of laser pulses. To derive satisfactory filtering results, this paper proposed a mean shift segmentation morphological filter. In this method, the mean shift segmentation is used for acquiring object primitives to determine filtering window sizes automatically. The point clouds detrending is proposed for improving the adaptability towards sloped terrains. A point cloud shifting in x and y directions technique is developed to acquire more ground seeds for generating a more accurate trending surface. Finally, the filtered ground points by the progressive morphological filter are recovered by adopting the surface-based filtering strategy. The proposed method is tested and validated using 14 samples with different forested environments. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve the average total error of 1.11%. The kappa coefficients of all these 14 samples are larger than 90% and the average kappa coefficient is 96.43%. The average root mean square error (RMSE) of the proposed method is 0.63. All these indicators are the best when compared to some other famous filtering methods.

Road information acquisition is an important part of city informatization construction. Airborne LiDAR provides a new means of acquiring road information. However, the existing road extraction methods using LiDAR point clouds always decide the road intensity threshold based on experience, which cannot obtain the optimal threshold to extract a road point cloud. Moreover, these existing methods are deficient in removing the interference of narrow roads and several attached areas (e.g., parking lot and bare ground) to main roads extraction, thereby imparting low completeness and correctness to the city road network extraction result. Aiming at resolving the key technical issues of road extraction from airborne LiDAR point clouds, this paper proposes a novel method to extract road centerlines from airborne LiDAR point clouds. The proposed approach is mainly composed of three key algorithms, namely, Skewness balancing, Rotating neighborhood, and Hierarchical fusion and optimization (SRH). The skewness balancing algorithm used for the filtering was adopted as a new method for obtaining an optimal intensity threshold such that the “pure” road point cloud can be obtained. The rotating neighborhood algorithm on the other hand was developed to remove narrow roads (corridors leading to parking lots or sidewalks), which are not the main roads to be extracted. The proposed hierarchical fusion and optimization algorithm caused the road centerlines to be unaffected by certain attached areas and ensured the road integrity as much as possible. The proposed method was tested using the Vaihingen dataset. The results demonstrated that the proposed method can effectively extract road centerlines in a complex urban environment with 91.4% correctness and 80.4% completeness.

Filtering is a key step for most airborne lidar post-applications in urban areas. To solve the problems of complex parameter settings and low filtering accuracy in complicated urban environments, an automatic morphological filter was proposed. In this paper, the optimal maximum filtering window can be determined automatically by applying a series of morphological top-hat operations. Meanwhile, the thresholds for filtering were calculated adaptively according to the gradient changes. Seven publicly available data sets provided by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing were used to evaluate the performance. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved an average total error of 4.07% and an average kappa coefficient of 90.90%, which are the best performances when compared to some other filtering methods.

This paper proposes a method by which scattered LIDAR point clouds are converted into a two-dimensional image and then building footprints are extracted through the image processing. Firstly point cloud grid is handled to generate georeferenced feature image, and then image threshold segmentation, morphological close operation, connectivity analysis and contour tracking method is used to obtain the final building footprints. Finally, based on the mapping relationship between georeferenced feature image and scattered point clouds, building outline points are obtained. Experimental result shows that this method could extract building footprints very well in plain area, but due to the adoption of single image segmentation method in the georeferenced feature image, it is not suitable for the building footprints extraction in mountainous area.

Obtaining high-precision filtering results from airborne lidar point clouds in complex environments has always been a hot topic. Mathematical morphology was widely used for filtering, owing to its simplicity and high efficiency. However, the morphology-based algorithms are deficient in preserving terrain details. In order to obtain a better filtering effect, this paper proposed an improved progressive morphological filter based on hierarchical radial basis function interpolation (PMHR) to refine the classical progressive morphological filter. PMHR involved two main improvements, namely, automatic setting of self-adaptive thresholds and terrain details preservation, respectively. The performance of PMHR was evaluated using datasets provided by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Experimental results show that PMHR achieved good performance under variant terrain features with an average total error of 4.27% and average Kappa coefficient of 84.57%.

Filtering is one of the core post-processing steps for airborne LiDAR point cloud. In recent years, the morphology-based filtering algorithms have proven to be a powerful and efficient tool for filtering airborne LiDAR point cloud. However, most traditional morphology-based algorithms have difficulties in preserving abrupt terrain features, especially when using larger filtering windows. In order to suppress the omission error caused by protruding terrain features, this paper proposes an improved morphological algorithm based on multi-level kriging interpolation. This algorithm is essentially a combination of progressive morphological filtering algorithm and multi-level interpolation filtering algorithm. The morphological opening operation is performed with filtering window gradually downsizing, while kriging interpolation is conducted at different levels according to the different filtering windows. This process is iterative in a top to down fashion until the filtering window is no longer greater than the preset minimum filtering window. Fifteen samples provided by the ISPRS commission were chosen to test the performance of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve promising results not only in flat urban areas but also in rural areas. Comparing with other eight classical filtering methods, the proposed method obtained the lowest omission error, and preserved protruding terrain features better.