Adaptive morphological filtering for DEM generation

This paper presents a novel approach to LiDAR filtering of ALS (Airborne Laser Scanning) data. The main effort is devoted to simplify and overcome the shortcomings of the existing morphological filtering algorithms. The proposed approach is based on the morphological erosion operation. The filtering is applied only to the points of discontinuity, which are identified from their residuals. The threshold for identifying the points of discontinuity is adaptively determined during the iteration. Our experiments show the proposed approach produces satisfying results in different terrain conditions with minimal change of parameters.