Lidar cloud and aerosol layer detection method based on point cloud filtering

Abstract

A point cloud filtering method is presented for atmospheric layer detection from lidar data. The method involves rising edge event recognition based on a wavelet transform function. Density-based clustering was then utilized to separate the real boundary from the original noisy point clouds based on continuous distribution characteristics of cloud and aerosol layer. Tests were carried out to verify the performance of our algorithm with synthetic lidar signals with noise. The layer base detection error within ± 5 bins was achieved for signals with SNRs higher than 3. Even for SNRs higher than 1, high consistency was still observed between retrieved results with our method and a visual analysis. These results indicate that our algorithm is suitable for unsupervised detection with large time-series datasets, such as CALIOP.