Filtering of airborne lidar point clouds for complex cityscapes

Abstract

A novel filtering algorithm for Lidar point clouds is presented, which can work well for complex cityscapes. Its main features are filtering based on raw Lidar point clouds without previous triangulation or rasterization. 3D topological relations among points are used to search edge points at the top of discontinuities, which are key information to recognize the bare earth points and building points. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm can preserve discontinuous features in the bare earth and has no impact of size and shape of buildings.