Urban DEM generation from airborne Lidar data

Digital surface model (DSM) can be acquired from airborne Lidar (light detection and ranging) directly. But for the production of digital elevation model (DEM) from the point cloud, the filtering of the point cloud should be carried out in order to remove points representing surface of non-ground objects. According to the deficiencies of slope based method and characteristics of Lidar data in urban area, a novel filtering algorithm for Lidar data that combining slope based method and region growing is presented in this paper. This method can improve precision and efficiency of filtering, and is very suitable for Lidar data of complex urban area. Experiment results show that the proposed method can remove objects in complex urban area effectively and rapidly.