Scan line void filling of airborne LiDAR point clouds for hydroflattening DEM

Abstract

Generation of LiDAR-derived digital elevation model (DEM), particularly for hydrologic and shore environments, poses a continuous challenge. The presence of laser dropouts found on the water bodies causes data voids/holes in the airborne LiDAR data point clouds. Unnatural huge triangular artifacts may appear in these regions when a DEM is generated, resulting in not only unpleasant visual effect but also inaccurate terrain analyses. The United States Geological Survey has stressed the need of having a hydro-flattened DEM in the LiDAR Base Specification. Different forms of water bodies should be represented by a flat surface. Existing approaches mainly rely on the use of ancillary data or manual intervention during the hydroflattening process. In this study, an automatic data processing workflow is proposed to: 1) classify land and water data points collected by a topographic airborne LiDAR system based on the scan line intensity-elevation ratio; 2) perform scan line void filling of data points in close-to-nadir region and at both swath edges; 3) generate a virtual water surface based on the classified water data points; 4) perform hydroflattening on the DEM. The proposed workflow was examined using five datasets collected by topographic airborne LiDAR on the inland ponds and lakes, inland rivers, nontidal boundary water bodies, tidal water bodies, and islands, as addressed in the LiDAR Base Specification. The results showed that the proposed workflow can successfully generate hydroflattened DEMs and overcome the drawback of existing approaches.