A new adaptive method to filter terrestrial laser scanner point clouds using morphological filters and spectral information to conserve surface micro-topography

Terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), widely known as light detection and ranging (LiDAR) technology, is increasingly used to provide highly detailed digital terrain models (DTM) with millimetric precision and accuracy. In order to generate a DTM, TLS data has to be filtered from undesired spurious objects, such as vegetation, artificial structures, etc., Early filtering techniques, successfully applied to airborne laser scanning (ALS), fail when applied to TLS data, as they heavily smooth the terrain surface and do not retain their real morphology. In this article, we present a new methodology for filtering TLS data based on the geometric and radiometric properties of the scanned surfaces. This methodology was built on previous morphological filters that select the minimum point height within a sliding window as the real surface. However, contrary to those methods, which use a fixed window size, the new methodology operates under different spatial scales represented by different window sizes, and can be adapted to different types and sizes of plants. This methodology has been applied to two study areas of differing vegetation type and density. The accuracy of the final DTMs was improved by ∼30% under dense canopy plants and over ∼40% on the open spaces between plants, where other methodologies drastically underestimated the real surface heights. This resulted in more accurate representation of the soil surface and microtopography than up-to-date techniques, eventually having strong implications in hydrological and geomorphological studies.