Comparative analysis and accuracy improvement on ground point filtering of airborne lidar data for forest terrain modeling

Airborne LIDAR system, utilized in various forest studies, provides efficiently spatial information about vertical structures of forest areas. The tree height is one of the most essential measurements to derive forest information such as biomass, which can be estimated from the forest terrain model. As the terrain model is generated by the interpolation of ground points extracted from LIDAR data, filtering methods with high reliability to classify reliably the ground points are required. In this paper, we applied three representative filtering methods to forest LIDAR data with diverse characteristics, measured the errors and performance of these methods, and analyzed the causes of the errors. Based on their complementary characteristics derived from the analysis results, we have attempted to combine the results and checked the performance improvement. In most test areas, the convergence method showed the satisfactory results, where the filtering performance were improved more than 10% in maximum. Also, we have generated DTM using the classified ground points and compared with the verification data. The DTM retains about 17cm RMSE, which can be sufficiently utilized for the derivation of forest information.