Surface Estimation from Aerial Laser Scanning Data with Non-parametric Piecewise Affine Model and Its Application

Abstract

This paper discusses how to estimate the ground surface from a point cloud measured by airborne laser scanning. Airborne laser scanning is a measurement system which collects point clouds by laser emitted from hovering drones. Although airborne laser scanning is a useful surveying method, a measured point cloud includes a lot of unnecessary data which corresponds to trees. To remove unnecessary data, this paper proposes a method to estimate the ground surface from measured point cloud. In particular, this paper focuses on Non-Parametric Piecewise Affine (NPPWA) map to approximate ground surface, and employs hard and soft constraints; 1) measured point cloud must lie above the surface, and 2) the surface should be smooth. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with real data.