Automatic breakline extraction from LIDAR point clouds
Shengwang Zhang · Journal of Computer Applications · 2008
For producing high quality Digital Terrain Model(DTM) based on Light Detection And Ranging(LIDAR) point clouds,breaklines must be explicitly stored and represented within the data structure.Having analyzed traditional methods' deficiencies in breakline extraction,the paper proposed an automatic extraction method.To accomplish breakline extraction,the method processed LIDAR point clouds in three steps.The first step,a mesh surface was reconstructed to establish explicit topological relation among the discrete points;the second,normal-based edge detection was applied on the irregular mesh to extract sharp borders with curvature discontinuity;finally,breaklines were traced with direction priority strategy and smoothed by iterative interpolation algorithm.The result shows that it is robust and has potential application in topographic analysis and mapping.