Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2025, Vol. 54 ›› Issue (6): 1082-1093.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2025.20240484

• Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing • Previous Articles     Next Articles

An efficient filtering method considering terrain features for large-scale airborne LiDAR point clouds

Lianzhong XU1(), Chuanfa CHEN1(), Dongxing CHEN2, Xingjie WANG1, Ziming YANG1, Shufan YANG1, Zhuangzhuang HONG1, Jinda HAO1   

  1. 1.College of Geodesy and Geomatics, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao 266590, China
    2.Shandong Coal Geology Bureau Second Exploration Team, Jining 272100, China
  • Received:2024-11-30 Revised:2025-04-28 Online:2025-07-14 Published:2025-07-14
  • Contact: Chuanfa CHEN E-mail:XU_Lianzhong@163.com;chencf@sdust.edu.cn
  • About author:XU Lianzhong (1999—), male, postgraduate, majors in intelligent processing of 3D point clouds. E-mail: XU_Lianzhong@163.com
  • Supported by:
    The National Natural Science Foundation of China(42271438);Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation, China(ZR2024MD040)

Abstract:

To solve the problems of low accuracy, slow computing speed and poor accuracy of the existing filtering methods for large-scale point cloud data in complex landscapes, an efficient filtering method considering terrain features for large-scale airborne LiDAR point clouds is proposed in this paper. Firstly, radius filtering and elevation histogram method are used to remove outliers from the raw point cloud. Secondly, a large number of evenly distributed ground seed points are efficiently extracted by combining the sliding grid with the M-estimation sample consistency algorithm. Then, the ground reference surface is constructed using a global weighted finite difference thin plate spline (TPS). Finally, a terrain-adaptive elevation threshold is designed to capture various types of ground points. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, a large-scale point cloud named OpenGF is used in the experiments. The results show that the average total error and Kappa coefficient of the proposed method are 2.45% and 94.54%, respectively, and its overall performance is much better than those of the 10 representative filtering methods. Moreover, the proposed method has a high computational efficiency.

Key words: point cloud filtering, airborne LiDAR, terrain-adaptive, thin plate spline

CLC Number: