DEM refinement by low vegetation removal based on the combination of full waveform data and progressive TIN densification

Abstract

Filtering of low vegetation with height less than approximately 1.5 m is a challenging problem, especially in mountainous areas covered by heavy low foliage, bushes and sub-shrubberies, etc. The paper proposes an approach for obtaining a more accurate Digital Elevation Model (DEM) by removing low vegetation from point cloud. The approach combines point cloud with full waveform data, and begins by filtering point cloud by way of progressive TIN densification (PTD) method. Ground points are thus extracted, but mixed with false ground points, which are mainly from low vegetation and other manmade low objects. Gaussian decomposition by grouping Levenberg–Marquardt (LM) algorithm with F test is performed for the full waveforms corresponding to the extracted ground points. Echo widths and backscattering coefficients are calculated based on the parameters extracted from the decomposition, and used to discriminate points of low vegetation from points of other low objects, allowing the false ground points reflected from low vegetation to be labeled. New elevation values are calculated from the last echoes of the waveforms from low vegetation, and the DEM is updated by replacing the original elevations with the calculated ones. The resultants are assessed both quantitatively by check points and qualitatively by rendered DEM and contour lines generated from it. The accuracy of the refined DEM with low vegetation removal increases by 31% compared with the original DEM in the experiment, showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach.