A Boundary-Based Ground-Point Filtering Method for Photogrammetric Point-Cloud Data

Abstract

Ground-point filtering from point-cloud data is an important process in remote sensing and the photogrammetric map-production line, especially in generating digital elevation models from airborne lidar and aerial photogrammetric point-cloud data. In this article, a new and simple boundary-based method is proposed for ground-point filtering from the photogrammetric point-cloud data. The proposed method uses the local height difference to extract the boundaries of objects. Then the extracted boundary points are traced to generate polygons around the borders of any objects on the ground. Finally, the points located inside these polygons, which are classified as non-ground points, are filtered. The experimental results on the photogrammetric point cloud show that the proposed method can adapt to complex environments. The total error of the proposed method is about 8.96%, which is promising in these challenging data sets. Moreover, the proposed method is compared with cloth simulation filtering, multi-scale curvature classification, and gLiDAR methods and gives better results.