TY - JOUR
T1 - A progressive morphological filter for removing nonground measurements from airborne LIDAR data
AU - Zhang, Keqi
AU - Chen, Shu Ching
AU - Whitman, Dean
AU - Shyu, Mei Ling
AU - Yan, Jianhua
AU - Zhang, Chengcui
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received July 28, 2002; revised October 29, 2002. This research was supported in part by Grant FEMA-DR-1249-FL from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
PY - 2003/4
Y1 - 2003/4
N2 - Recent advances in airborne light detection and ranging (LIDAR) technology allow rapid and inexpensive measurements of topography over large areas. This technology is becoming a primary method for generating high-resolution digital terrain models (DTMs) that are essential to numerous applications such as flood modeling and landslide prediction. Airborne LIDAR systems usually return a three-dimensional cloud of point measurements from reflective objects scanned by the laser beneath the flight path. In order to generate a DTM, measurements from nonground features such as buildings, vehicles, and vegetation have to be classified and removed. In this paper, a progressive morphological filter was developed to detect nonground LIDAR measurements. By gradually increasing the window size of the filter and using elevation difference thresholds, the measurements of vehicles, vegetation, and buildings are removed, while ground data are preserved. Datasets from mountainous and flat urbanized areas were selected to test the progressive morphological filter. The results show that the filter can remove most of the nonground points effectively.
AB - Recent advances in airborne light detection and ranging (LIDAR) technology allow rapid and inexpensive measurements of topography over large areas. This technology is becoming a primary method for generating high-resolution digital terrain models (DTMs) that are essential to numerous applications such as flood modeling and landslide prediction. Airborne LIDAR systems usually return a three-dimensional cloud of point measurements from reflective objects scanned by the laser beneath the flight path. In order to generate a DTM, measurements from nonground features such as buildings, vehicles, and vegetation have to be classified and removed. In this paper, a progressive morphological filter was developed to detect nonground LIDAR measurements. By gradually increasing the window size of the filter and using elevation difference thresholds, the measurements of vehicles, vegetation, and buildings are removed, while ground data are preserved. Datasets from mountainous and flat urbanized areas were selected to test the progressive morphological filter. The results show that the filter can remove most of the nonground points effectively.
KW - Airborne laser altimetry
KW - Digital terrain model (DTM)
KW - Light detection and ranging (LIDAR) data filtering
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U2 - 10.1109/TGRS.2003.810682
DO - 10.1109/TGRS.2003.810682
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0037934719
VL - 41
SP - 872
EP - 882
JO - IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
JF - IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
SN - 0196-2892
IS - 4 PART I
ER -