Filtering is one of the core post-processing steps for airborne LiDAR point cloud. In recent years, the morphology-based filtering algorithms have proven to be a powerful and efficient tool for filtering airborne LiDAR point cloud. However, most traditional morphology-based algorithms have difficulties in preserving abrupt terrain features, especially when using larger filtering windows. In order to suppress the omission error caused by protruding terrain features, this paper proposes an improved morphological algorithm based on multi-level kriging interpolation. This algorithm is essentially a combination of progressive morphological filtering algorithm and multi-level interpolation filtering algorithm. The morphological opening operation is performed with filtering window gradually downsizing, while kriging interpolation is conducted at different levels according to the different filtering windows. This process is iterative in a top to down fashion until the filtering window is no longer greater than the preset minimum filtering window. Fifteen samples provided by the ISPRS commission were chosen to test the performance of the proposed algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method can achieve promising results not only in flat urban areas but also in rural areas. Comparing with other eight classical filtering methods, the proposed method obtained the lowest omission error, and preserved protruding terrain features better.

In this study, a novel coupling model for landslide susceptibility mapping is presented. In practice, environmental factors may have different impacts at a local scale in study areas. To provide better predictions, a geographically weighted regression (GWR) technique is firstly used in our method to segment study areas into a series of prediction regions with appropriate sizes. Meanwhile, a support vector machine (SVM) classifier is exploited in each prediction region for landslide susceptibility mapping. To further improve the prediction performance, the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used in the prediction regions to obtain optimal parameters for the SVM classifier. To evaluate the prediction performance of our model, several SVM-based prediction models are utilized for comparison on a study area of the Wanzhou district in the Three Gorges Reservoir. Experimental results, based on three objective quantitative measures and visual qualitative evaluation, indicate that our model can achieve better prediction accuracies and is more effective for landslide susceptibility mapping. For instance, our model can achieve an overall prediction accuracy of 91.10%, which is 7.8%–19.1% higher than the traditional SVM-based models. In addition, the obtained landslide susceptibility map by our model can demonstrate an intensive correlation between the classified very high-susceptibility zone and the previously investigated landslides.

The popularity of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) methodology has been growing in a wide variety of areas in geodesy and geospatial sciences. Its ability to perform coordinate transformation between different datums has been well documented in literature. In the application of the ANN methods for the coordinate transformation, only the train-test (hold-out cross-validation) approach has usually been used to evaluate their performance. Here, the data set is divided into two disjoint subsets thus, training (model building) and testing (model validation) respectively. However, one major drawback in the hold-out cross-validation procedure is inappropriate data partitioning. Improper split of the data could lead to a high variance and bias in the results generated. Besides, in a sparse dataset situation, the hold-out cross-validation is not suitable. For these reasons, the K-fold cross-validation approach has been recommended. Consequently, this study, for the first time, explored the potential of using K-fold cross-validation method in the performance assessment of radial basis function neural network and Bursa-Wolf model under data-insufficient situation in Ghana geodetic reference network. The statistical analysis of the results revealed that incorrect data partition could lead to a false reportage on the predictive performance of the transformation model. The findings revealed that the RBFNN and Bursa-Wolf model produced a transformation accuracy of 0.229 m and 0.469 m, respectively. It was also realised that a maximum horizontal error of 0.881 m and 2.131 m was given by the RBFNN and Bursa-Wolf. The obtained results per the cadastral surveying and plan production requirement set by the Ghana Survey and Mapping Division are applicable. This study will contribute to the usage of K-fold cross-validation approach in developing countries having the same sparse dataset situation like Ghana as well as in the geodetic sciences where ANN users seldom apply the statistical resampling technique.

Most filtering algorithms suffer from complex parameter settings or threshold adjusting. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an improved skewness balancing filtering algorithm based on thin plate spline (TPS) interpolation. The proposed algorithm filters the nonground points in an iterative manner. A reference surface that reflects the fluctuation of the terrain is generated using the TPS interpolation method. Accordingly, the elevation difference from each point to the surface can be calculated. By applying the skewness balancing principle to these elevation differences, nonground points can be removed automatically. To verify the validity and robustness of the proposed method, the datasets provided by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) were adopted. The experimental results show that this presented method can adapt to complex environments and achieve a higher filtering accuracy than the traditional skewness balancing algorithm. Moreover, in comparison with the other eight filtering methods tested by the ISPRS and four improved filtering methods proposed recently, the proposed method achieved an average total error of 5.39%, which is smaller than that of most of these other methods.