Airborne LiDAR Point Cloud Filtering Algorithm Based on Supervoxel Ground Saliency

Abstract. Airborne laser scanning (ALS) is able to penetrate sparse vegetation to obtain highly accurate height information on the ground surface. LiDAR point cloud filtering is an important prerequisite for downstream tasks such as digital terrain model (DTM) extraction and point cloud classification. Aiming at the problem that existing LiDAR point cloud filtering algorithms are prone to errors in complex terrain environments, an ALS point cloud filtering method based on supervoxel ground saliency (SGSF) is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a boundary-preserving TBBP supervoxel algorithm is utilized to perform supervoxel segmentation of ALS point clouds, and multi-directional scanning strip delineation and ground saliency computation are carried out for the clusters of supervoxel point clouds. Subsequently, the energy function is constructed by introducing the ground saliency and the optimal filtering plane of the supervoxel is solved using the semi-global optimization idea to realize the effective distinction between ground and non-ground points. Experimental results on the ALS point cloud filtering dataset openGF indicate that, compared to state-of-the-art surface-based filtering methods, the SGSF algorithm achieves the highest average values across various terrain conditions for multiple evaluation metrics. It also addresses the issue of recessed structures in buildings being prone to misclassification as ground points.