Removing Excessive Low Noise from Dense-Matching Point Clouds

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Point clouds produced with dense-matching by photogrammetry software such as SURE, Pix4D, or Photoscan can include a fair amount of the kind of „low noise“ as seen below. Low noise causes trouble when attempting to construct a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) from the points as common algorithm for classifying points into ground and non-ground points – such as lasground – tend to „latch onto“ those low points, thereby producing a poor representation of the terrain. This blog post describes one possible LAStools workflow for eliminating excessive low noise. It was developed after a question in the LAStools user forum by LASmoons holder Muriel Lavy who was able to share her noisy data with us. See this, this, this, this, this, and this blog post for further reading on this topic.

Here you can download the dense matching point cloud that we are using in the following work flow:

We leave the usual inspection of the content with lasinfo, lasview, and lasvalidate that we always recommend on newly obtained data as an exercise to the reader. Note that a check for proper alignment of flightlines with lasoverlap that we consider mandatory for LiDAR data is not applicable for dense-matching points.

With lastile we turn the original file with 87,261,083 points into many smaller 500 by 500 meter tiles for efficient multi-core processing. Each tile is given a 25 meter buffer to avoid edge artifacts. The buffer points are marked as withheld for easier on-the-fly removal. We add a (terser) description of the WGS84 UTM zone 32N to each tile via the corresponding EPSG code 32632:
lastile -i muriel\20161127_Pancalieri_UTM.laz ^
        -tile_size 500 -buffer 25 -flag_as_withheld ^
        -epsg 32632 ^
        -odir muriel\tiles_raw -o panca.laz
Because dense-matching points often have a poor point order in the files they get delivered in we use lassort to rearrange them into a space-filling curve order as this will speed up most following processing steps:
lassort -i muriel\tiles_raw\panca*.laz ^
        -odir muriel\tiles_sorted -olaz ^
        -cores 7
We then run lasthin to reclassify the highest point of every 2.5 by 2.5 meter grid cell with classification code 8. As the spacing of the dense-matched points is around 40 cm in both x and y, around 40 points will fall into each such grid cell from which the highest is then classified as 8:
lasthin -i muriel\tiles_sorted\panca*.laz ^
        -step 2.5 ^
        -highest -classify_as 8 ^
        -odir muriel\tiles_thinned -olaz ^
        -cores 7
Considering only those points classified as 8 in the last step we then run lasnoise to find points that are highly isolated in wide and flat neighborhoods that are then reclassified as 7. See the README file of lasnoise for a detailed explanation of the different parameters:
lasnoise -i muriel\tiles_thinned\panca*.laz ^
         -ignore_class 0 ^
         -step_xy 5 -step_z 0.1 -isolated 4 ^
         -classify_as 7 ^
         -odir muriel\tiles_isolated -olaz ^
         -cores 7
Now we run a temporary ground classification of only (!!!) on those points that are still classified as 8 using the default parameters of lasground. Hence we only use the points that were the highest points on the 2.5 by 2.5 meter grid and that were not classified as noise in the previous step. See the README file of lasground for a detailed explanation of the different parameters:
lasground -i muriel\tiles_isolated\panca*.laz ^
          -city -ultra_fine -ignore_class 0 7 ^
          -odir muriel\tiles_temp_ground -olaz ^
          -cores 7
The result of this temporary ground filtering is then merely used to mark all points that are 0.5 meter below the triangulated TIN of these temporary ground points with classification code 12 using lasheight. See the README file of lasheight for a detailed explanation of the different parameters:
lasheight -i muriel\tiles_temp_ground\panca*.laz ^
          -do_not_store_in_user_data ^
          -classify_below -0.5 12 ^
          -odir muriel\tiles_temp_denoised -olaz ^
          -cores 7
In the resulting tiles the low noise (but also many points above the ground) are now marked and in a final step we produce properly classified denoised tiles by re-mapping the temporary classification codes to conventions that are more consistent with the ASPRS LAS specification using las2las:
las2las -i muriel\tiles_temp_denoised\panca*.laz ^
        -change_classification_from_to 1 0 ^
        -change_classification_from_to 2 0 ^
        -change_classification_from_to 7 0 ^
        -change_classification_from_to 12 7 ^
        -odir muriel\tiles_denoised -olaz ^
        -cores 7
Let us visually check what each of the above steps has produced by zooming in on a 300 meter by 100 meter strip of points with the bounding box (388500,4963125) to (388800,4963225) in tile ‚panca_388500_4963000.laz‘:
The final classification of all points that are not already classified as noise (7) into ground (2) or non-ground (1) was done with a final run of lasground. See the README file of lasground for a detailed explanation of the different parameters:
lasground -i muriel\tiles_denoised\panca*.laz ^
          -ignore_class 7 ^
          -city -ultra_fine ^
          -odir muriel\tiles_ground -olaz ^
          -cores 7
Then we create a seamless hill-shaded DTM tiles by triangulating all the points classified as ground into a temporary TIN (including those in the 25 meter buffer) and then rasterizing only the inner 500 meter by 500 meter of each tile with option ‚-use_tile_bb‘ of las2dem. For more details on the importance of buffers in tile-based processing see this blog post here.
las2dem -i muriel\tiles_ground\panca*.laz ^
        -keep_class 2 ^
        -step 1 -hillshade ^
        -use_tile_bb ^
        -odir muriel\tiles_dtm -opng ^
        -cores 7

And here the original DSM side-by-side with resulting DTM after low noise removal. One dense forested area near the center of the data was not entirely removed due to the lack of ground points in this area. Integrating external ground points or manual editing with lasview are two possible way to rectify these few remaining errors …

4 Kommentare zu „Removing Excessive Low Noise from Dense-Matching Point Clouds“

  2. Brad

    Martin,
    Great tutorial and workflow – thanks for posting this!
    I have avidly read this and the previous 6 blog posts on the topic, as this is a problem I am directly dealing with in my data.
    Areas with open water (as in this example) frequently cause me problems with excessive low and high noise. Now you’ve given us a workflow for the removal of the low noise component. I wonder if you also have some thoughts on how to remove the high noise?
    In my datasets, these high noise features often get mis-classified at trees or vegetation. The points are clustered into spikey shapes, with point densities too high to be filtered out as sparse noise or outliers.
    Perhaps the solution is some combination of filtering based on the highest ~10 percentile and pixel color values?
    Thanks

  3. Pingback: Digital Pothole Removal: Clean Road Surface from Noisy Pix4D Point Cloud | rapidlasso GmbH

  4. Pingback: Using Open LiDAR to Remove Low Noise from Photogrammetric UAV Point Clouds | rapidlasso GmbH

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