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Over the past decades, plenty of filtering algorithms have been presented to distinguish ground and non-ground points from airborne LiDAR point clouds. However, with the existing methods, it is difficult to derive satisfactory filtering results on rugged terrains with dense vegetation due to the low-level penetration ability of laser pulses. Therefore, a multi-level interpolation-based filter is developed in this paper. The novelty of the algorithm lies within its usage of multi-scale morphological operations and robust z-score to correctly select ground seeds as more as possible, and a terrain-adaptive residual threshold to adapt to various terrain characteristics. Rural samples provided by International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) were employed to assess the performance of the proposed method and its results were compared with 15 filtering algorithms developed in recent 5 years (2015-2019). Results show that the proposed method with the optimized parameters produces the best accuracy with the average total error and kappa coefficient of 1.89% and 87.88%, respectively. We further filtered high-density point clouds in six forested areas with different vegetation covers and terrain slopes. Results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is more accurate than the well-known filtering methods including morphological-based filter, progressive TIN densification filter (PTD), improved PTD and cloth simulation filter, with the average total error decreased by 26.2%, 19.9%, 3.8% and 40.4%, respectively. Moreover, the DEMs of the proposed method have lower average root mean square errors than the four classical filters. Therefore, the proposed method can be considered as an effective ground filtering algorithm for airborne LiDAR point clouds in forested areas.

To attenuate positional errors of LiDAR-derived datasets for constructing digital elevation models (DEMs), a feature-preserving point denoising algorithm (F-PDA) is developed in this paper. F-PDA i...

Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology has become the mainstream data source in geosciences and environmental sciences. Point cloud filtering is a prerequisite for almost all LiDAR-based applications. However, it is challenging to select a suitable filtering algorithm for handling high-density point clouds over complex landscapes. Therefore, to determine an appropriate filter on a specific environment, this paper comparatively assessed the performance of five representative filtering algorithms on six study sites with different terrain characteristics, where three plots are located in urban areas and three in forest areas. The representative filtering methods include simple morphological filter (SMRF), multiresolution hierarchical filter (MHF), slope-based filter (SBF), progressive TIN densification (PTD) and segmentation-based filter (SegBF). Results demonstrate that SMRF performs the best in urban areas, and compared to MHF, SBF, PTD and SegBF, the total error of SMRF is reduced by 1.38%, 48.21%, 48.25% and 31.03%, respectively. MHF outperforms the others in forest areas, and compared to SMRF, SBF, PTD and SegBF, the total error of MHF is reduced by 1.98%, 35.87%, 45.11% and 9.42%, respectively. Moreover, both SMRF and MHF keep a good balance between type I and II errors, which makes the produced DEMs much similar to the references. Overall, SMRF and MHF are recommended for urban and forest areas, respectively, and MHF averagely performs slightly better than SMRF on all areas with respect to kappa coefficient.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0176954.].

Due to the penetration ability of airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) into tree crowns, data pits commonly appear in lidar-derived canopy height models (CHMs). They have a seriously negative effect on the quality of tree detection and subsequent biophysical measurements. To construct a pit-free CHM, an algorithm based on robust locally weighted regression and robust z-score was presented to remove data pits. The significant advantage of the new algorithm is parameter-free, which makes it efficient and robust for practical applications. A numerical test and a real-world example were respectively employed to assess the performance of our method for CHM construction, and its results were compared with those of three classical methods including natural neighbor interpolation of the highest point method, mean and median filters. The numerical test demonstrates that our algorithm is more accurate than the other methods for generating pit-free CHMs under the presence of data pits. The real-world example shows that compared with the classical methods, our method has a better ability of data pit removal. Moreover, our method performs better than the other methods for deriving plot-level maximum tree height from CHMs. In a word, the new method shows high potential for pit-free CHM construction.

Separating ground from non-ground points is a challenging and essential task before the applications of airborne Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) data. The classical filters generally show good results on simple landscapes, but suffer from large filtering errors on complex landscapes with steep slopes and terrain discontinuities. To produce more satisfactory results over these landscapes, a scale-irrelevant and terrain-adaptive interpolation-based filter is presented in this paper. The contributions of the proposed method include a 1D spline-based algorithm for the collection of evenly distributed ground seeds as many as possible, a scale-irrelevant interpolation for estimating the heights of unclassified points and a terrain-adaptive elevation threshold to adapt to various terrain characteristics. The performance of the proposed method was first evaluated on the International Society Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) benchmark dataset. Results show that the proposed method with the average total error of 2.70% and kappa coefficient of 90.84% outperforms the existing filtering algorithms developed in recent decade (2010–2020). The performance of the proposed method was further assessed on four high-density airborne LiDAR point clouds located in urban and forested sites and compared with four state-of-the-art filters including progressive morphological filter (PMF), cloth simulation filter (CSF), progressive TIN densification (PTD) and multiresolution hierarchical filter (MHF). Results demonstrate that the proposed method is averagely more accurate than the well-known filters in terms of total error and kappa coefficient, and much faster than PTD and MHF. Moreover, the proposed method produces more satisfactory DEMs than the classical methods.

Light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technique is currently one of the most important tools for collecting elevation points with a high density in the context of digital elevation model (DEM) construction. However, the high density data always leads to serious time and memory consumption problems in data processing. In this paper, we have developed a thin plate spline (TPS)-based feature-preserving (TPS-F) method for LiDAR-derived ground data reduction by selecting a certain amount of significant terrain points and by extracting geomorphological features from the raw dataset to maintain the accuracy of constructed DEMs as high as possible, while maximally keeping terrain features. We employed four study sites with different topographies (i.e., flat, undulating, hilly and mountainous terrains) to analyze the performance of TPS-F for LiDAR data reduction in the context of DEM construction. These results were compared with those of the TPS-based algorithm without features (TPS-W) and two classical data selection methods including maximum z-tolerance (Max-Z) and the random method. Results show that irrespective of terrain characteristic, the two versions of TPS-based approaches (i.e., TPS-F and TPS-W) are always more accurate than the classical methods in terms of error range and root means square error. Moreover, in terms of streamline matching rate (SMR), TPS-F has a better ability of preserving geomorphological features, especially for the mountainous terrain. For example, the average SMR of TPS-F is 89.2% in the mountainous area, while those of TPS-W, max-Z and the random method are 56.6%, 34.7% and 35.3%, respectively.

Data pits commonly appear in lidar-derived canopy height models (CHMs) owing to the penetration ability of airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) into tree crowns. They have a seriously negative effect on the quality of tree detection and subsequent biophysical measurements. In this study, we propose an algorithm based on robust locally weighted regression and robust z-scores for the construction of a pit-free CHM. A significant advantage of the new algorithm is that it is parameter free, which makes it efficient and robust for practical applications. Simulated and airborne lidar-derived data sets are employed to assess the performance of the new method for CHM construction, and its results are compared to those of three classical methods, namely the natural neighbor (NN) interpolation of the highest point method (HPM), mean filter, and median filter. The results from the simulated data set demonstrate that our algorithm is more accurate compared to the three classical methods for generating pit-free CHMs in the presence of data pits. CHM construction using the lidar-derived data set shows that, compared to the classical methods, the new method has a better ability to remove data pits as well as preserving the edges, shapes, and structures of canopy gaps and crowns. Moreover, the proposed method performs better compared to the classical methods in deriving plot-level maximum tree heights from CHMs. Thus, the new method shows high potential for pit-free CHM construction.

We presented a multiresolution hierarchical classification (MHC) algorithm for differentiating ground from non-ground LiDAR point cloud based on point residuals from the interpolated raster surface. MHC includes three levels of hierarchy, with the simultaneous increase of cell resolution and residual threshold from the low to the high level of the hierarchy. At each level, the surface is iteratively interpolated towards the ground using thin plate spline (TPS) until no ground points are classified, and the classified ground points are used to update the surface in the next iteration. 15 groups of benchmark dataset, provided by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) commission, were used to compare the performance of MHC with those of the 17 other publicized filtering methods. Results indicated that MHC with the average total error and average Cohen’s kappa coefficient of 4.11% and 86.27% performs better than all other filtering methods.

Geostatistical characterization of local DEM error is usually based on the assumption of a stationary variogram model which requires the mean and variance to be finite and constant in the area under investigation. However, in practice this assumption is appropriate only in a restricted spatial location, where the local experimental variograms vary slowly. Therefore, an adaptive method is developed in this article to model non-stationary variograms, for which the estimator and the indicator for characterization of spatial variation are a Voronoi map and the standard deviation of mean values displayed in the Voronoi map, respectively. For the adaptive method, the global domain is divided into different meshes with various sizes according to the variability of local variograms. The adaptive method of non-stationary variogram modeling is applied to simulating error surfaces of a LiDAR derived DEM located in Sichuan province, China. Results indicate that the locally adaptive variogram model is more accurate than the global one for capturing the characterization of spatial variation in DEM errors. The adaptive model can be considered as an alternative approach to modeling non-stationary variograms for DEM error surface simulation.

A robust estimator based on the M-estimation principle (REMP) has been developed for digital elevation model (DEM) accuracy assessment. Adaptive weights were employed to respond to a broad class of DEM error distributions, and an iterative procedure in terms of REMP starting from robust initial estimates with a high breakdown point was introduced. Original DEMs with the resolution of 2 m were obtained by means of light detection and Ranging (LiDAR) from two study sites. DEM errors in each study site were, respectively, calculated based on 100 checkpoints captured by real-time kinematic (RTK) in terms of stratified random sampling strategy. Each group of DEM errors was, respectively, contaminated by five groups of outliers from different distributions. Thus, ten groups of simulated DEM errors were employed to comparatively assess the estimation accuracies of REMP and the classical estimators. The results indicated that under the non-normal distribution of DEM errors, the classical non-robust estimators are seriously influenced by the non-normality. Some robust estimators such as 10%-trimmed or Winsorized mean and normalized median absolute deviation (MADN) are not very robust to resist the influence of outliers. REMP, slightly affected by the non-normal distribution of DEM errors, is more accurate than the classical estimators. The robust methodology can adapt to the DEMs, especially the ones derived from remote sensing such as LiDAR or digital photogrammetry in non-open terrain.

A fast and robust interpolation filter based on finite difference TPS has been proposed in this paper. The proposed method employs discrete cosine transform to efficiently solve the linear system of TPS equations in case of gridded data, and by a pre-defined weight function with respect to simulation residuals to reduce the effect of outliers and misclassified non-ground points on the accuracy of reference ground surface construction. Fifteen groups of benchmark datasets, provided by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) commission, were employed to compare the performance of the proposed method with that of the multi-resolution hierarchical classification method (MHC). Results indicate that with respect to kappa coefficient and total error, the proposed method is averagely more accurate than MHC. Specifically, the proposed method is 1.03 and 1.32 times as accurate as MHC in terms of kappa coefficient and total errors. More importantly, the proposed method is averagely more than 8 times faster than MHC. In comparison with some recently developed methods, the proposed algorithm also achieves a good performance.