Filtering airborne LiDAR data by embedding smoothness-constrained segmentation in progressive TIN densification

Progressive TIN densification (PTD) is one of the classic methods for filtering airborne LiDAR point clouds. However, it may fail to preserve ground measurements in areas with steep terrain. A method is proposed to improve the PTD using a point cloud segmentation method, namely segmentation using smoothness constraint (SUSC). The classic PTD has two core steps. The first is selecting seed points and constructing the initial TIN. The second is an iterative densification of the TIN. Our main improvement is embedding the SUSC between these two steps. Specifically, after selecting the lowest points in each grid cell as initial ground seed points, SUSC is employed to expand the set of ground seed points as many as possible, as this can identify more ground seed points for the subsequent densification of the TIN-based terrain model. Seven datasets of ISPRS Working Group III/3 are utilized to test our proposed algorithm and the classic PTD. Experimental results suggest that, compared with the PTD, the proposed method is capable of preserving discontinuities of landscapes and reducing the omission errors and total errors by approximately 10% and 6% respectively, which would significantly decrease the cost of the manual operation required for correcting the result in post-processing.