A gradient-constrained morphological filtering algorithm for airborne LiDAR

This paper presents a novel gradient-constrained morphological filtering algorithm for bare-earth extraction from light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data. Based on the gradient feature points determined by morphological half-gradients, the potential object points are located prior to filtering. Innovative gradient-constrained morphological operations are created, which are executed only for the potential object points. Compared with the traditional morphological operations, the new operations reduce many meaningless operations for object removal and consequently decrease the possibility of losing terrain to a great extent. The applicability and reliability of this algorithm are demonstrated by evaluating the filtering performance for fifteen sample datasets in various complex scenes. The proposed algorithm is found to achieve a high level of accuracy compared with eight other filtering algorithms tested by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Moreover, the proposed algorithm has minimal error oscillation for different landscapes, which is important for quality control of digital terrain model generation.