Object-based point cloud analysis (OBPA) is useful for information extraction from airborne LiDAR point clouds. An object-based classification method is proposed for classifying the airborne LiDAR point clouds in urban areas herein. In the process of classification, the surface growing algorithm is employed to make clustering of the point clouds without outliers, thirteen features of the geometry, radiometry, topology and echo characteristics are calculated, a support vector machine (SVM) is utilized to classify the segments, and connected component analysis for 3D point clouds is proposed to optimize the original classification results. Three datasets with different point densities and complexities are employed to test our method. Experiments suggest that the proposed method is capable of making a classification of the urban point clouds with the overall classification accuracy larger than 92.34% and the Kappa coefficient larger than 0.8638, and the classification accuracy is promoted with the increasing of the point density, which is meaningful for various types of applications.

This paper presents an automated and effective method for detecting 3D edges and tracing feature lines from 3D-point clouds. This method is named Analysis of Geometric Properties of Neighborhoods (AGPN), and it includes two main steps: edge detection and feature line tracing. In the edge detection step, AGPN analyzes geometric properties of each query point’s neighborhood, and then combines RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) and angular gap metric to detect edges. In the feature line tracing step, feature lines are traced by a hybrid method based on region growing and model fitting in the detected edges. Our approach is experimentally validated on complex man-made objects and large-scale urban scenes with millions of points. Comparative studies with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that our method obtains a promising, reliable, and high performance in detecting edges and tracing feature lines in 3D-point clouds. Moreover, AGPN is insensitive to the point density of the input data.

Optical imagery and Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) point cloud are two major data sources in the community of photogrammetry and remote sensing. Optical images and LiDAR data have unique characteristics that make them preferable in certain applications. On the other hand, the disadvantage of one type of data source may be compensated by an advantage of the other. Hence, data fusion is a prerequisite to utilising the complementary characteristics of both data sources. Numerous methods haven been proposed to perform the fusion in various applications. This article makes a systematic review of the state-of-the-art fusion methodology used in various applications, such as registration, generation of true orthophotographs, pan-sharpening, classification, recognition of some key targets, three-dimensional reconstruction, change detection and forest inventory. Moreover, the future developing trends are introduced. In the coming few years, we expect that fusion of optical images and LiDAR point cloud will promote the development of both photogrammetry and laser scanning in both industry and scientific research.

This paper presents an automated and effective framework for classifying airborne laser scanning (ALS) point clouds. The framework is composed of four stages: (i) step-wise point cloud segmentation, (ii) feature extraction, (iii) Random Forests (RF) based feature selection and classification, and (iv) post-processing. First, a step-wise point cloud segmentation method is proposed to extract three kinds of segments, including planar, smooth and rough surfaces. Second, a segment, rather than an individual point, is taken as the basic processing unit to extract features. Third, RF is employed to select features and classify these segments. Finally, semantic rules are employed to optimize the classification result. Three datasets provided by Open Topography are utilized to test the proposed method. Experiments show that our method achieves a superior classification result with an overall classification accuracy larger than 91.17%, and kappa coefficient larger than 83.79%.

Data from the U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Line-scan System are often used to map impervious surface area (ISA) distribution at regional and global scales, but its coarse spatial resolution and data saturation produce high inaccuracy in ISA estimation. Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (SNPP) Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite’s Day/Night Band (VIIRS-DNB) with its high spatial resolution and dynamic data range may provide new insights but has not been fully examined in mapping ISA distribution. In this paper, a new variable—Large-scale Impervious Surface Index (LISI)—is proposed to integrate VIIRS-DNB and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data for mapping ISA distribution. A regression model was established, in which LISI was used as an independent variable and the reference ISA from Landsat images was a dependent variable. The results indicated a better estimation performance using LISI than using a single VIIRS-DNB or MODIS NDVI variable. The LISI-based approach provides accurate spatial patterns from high values in core urban areas to low values in rural areas, with an overall root mean squared error of 0.11. The LISI-based approach is recommended for fractional ISA estimation in a large area.

High precision positioning of UWB (ultra-wideband) in NLOS (non-line-of-sight) environment is one of the hot issues in the direction of indoor positioning. In this paper, a method of using a complementary Kalman filter (CKF) to fuse and filter UWB and IMU (inertial measurement unit) data and track the errors of variables such as position, speed, and direction is presented. Based on the uncertainty of magnetometer and acceleration, the noise covariance matrix of magnetometer and accelerometer is calculated dynamically, and then the weight of magnetometer data is set adaptively to correct the directional error of gyroscope. Based on the uncertainty of UWB distance observations, the covariance matrix of UWB measurement noise is calculated dynamically, and then the weight of UWB data observations is set adaptively to correct the position error. The position, velocity and direction errors are corrected by the fusion of UWB and IMU. The experimental results show that the algorithm can reduce the gyroscope deviation with magnetic noise and motion noise, so that the orientation estimates can be improved, as well as the positioning accuracy can be increased with UWB ranging noise.