AN AUTOMATIC FILTER ALGORITHM FOR DENSE IMAGE MATCHING POINT CLOUDS

Abstract. Although many filter algorithms have been presented over past decades, these algorithms are usually designed for the Lidar point clouds and can’t separate the ground points from the DIM (dense image matching, DIM) point clouds derived from the oblique aerial images owing to the high density and variation of the DIM point clouds completely. To solve this problem, a new automatic filter algorithm is developed on the basis of adaptive TIN models. At first, the differences between Lidar and DIM point clouds which influence the filtering results are analysed in this paper. To avoid the influences of the plants which can’t be penetrated by the DIM point clouds in the searching seed pointes process, the algorithm makes use of the facades of buildings to get ground points located on the roads as seed points and construct the initial TIN. Then a new densification strategy is applied to deal with the problem that the densification thresholds do not change as described in other methods in each iterative process. Finally, we use the DIM point clouds located in Potsdam produced by Photo-Scan to evaluate the method proposed in this paper. The experiment results show that the method proposed in this paper can not only separate the ground points from the DIM point clouds completely but also obtain the better filter results compared with TerraSolid. 1.