Generation of a DTM and building detection based on an MPF through integrating airborne lidar data and aerial images

Abstract

This study presents an approach that uses airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) data and aerial imagery for creating a digital terrain model (DTM) and for extracting building objects. The process of creating the DTM from lidar data requires four steps in this study: pre-processing, segmentation, extraction of ground points, and refinement. In the pre-processing step, raw data are transformed to raster data. For segmentation, we propose a new mean planar filter (MPF) that uses a 3 × 3 kernel to divide lidar data into planar and nonplanar surfaces. For extraction of ground points, a new method to extract additional ground points in forest areas is used, thus improving the accuracy of the DTM. The refinement process further increases the accuracy of the DTM by repeated comparison of a temporary DTM and the digital surface model. After the DTM is generated, building objects are extracted via a proposed three-step process: detection of high objects, removal of forest areas, and removal of small areas. High objects are extracted using the height threshold from the normalized digital surface model. To remove forest areas from among the high objects, an aerial image and normalized digital surface model from the lidar data are used in a supervised classification. Finally, an area-based filter eliminates small areas, such as noise, thus extracting building objects. To evaluate the proposed method, we applied this and three other methods to five sites in different environments. The experiment showed that the proposed method leads to a notable increase in accuracy over three other methods when compared with the in situ reference data.