IMPROVED TORNADO METHOD FOR GROUND POINT FILTERING FROM LIDAR POINT CLOUDS

Abstract. In this paper, an improved Tornado method for filtering LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) point clouds is presented. The original method uses a vertical cone with a downward vertex and an upward base to remove the points within it as non-ground points. The remaining points are ground points. The cone moves on the ground surface over the entire region of the point cloud. In this work, the regions of the objects are predicted by extracting the vertical features that have points in the vertical plane or vertical column. Therefore, the tornado method is only used in regions that contain objects. In addition, our improved method uses a specific height for a tornado to reduce the Type I error in mountainous areas. Also, a cylinder surrounding the cone is used to reduce the distance calculations between the cone and the point cloud. The results show that this method is very effective and fast compared to the original method. It also has promising results for the Type I error. In addition, this method was tested on the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) datasets and produced outstanding results. The results show that this method achieves high filtering accuracy. Moreover, the proposed method achieves an overall average error of 6.83%, which is lower than most other methods.