A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal

Detecting Terrain Stoniness From Airborne Laser Scanning Data




AuthorsNevalainen P, Middleton M, Sutinen R, Heikkonen J, Pahikkala T

PublisherMDPI AG

Publication year2016

JournalRemote Sensing

Journal name in sourceREMOTE SENSING

Journal acronymREMOTE SENS-BASEL

Article numberARTN 720

Volume8

Issue9

Number of pages21

ISSN2072-4292

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.3390/rs8090720


Abstract
Three methods to estimate the presence of ground surface stones from publicly available Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) point clouds are presented. The first method approximates the local curvature by local linear multi-scale fitting, and the second method uses Discrete-Differential Gaussian curvature based on the ground surface triangulation. The third baseline method applies Laplace filtering to Digital Elevation Model (DEM) in a 2 m regular grid data. All methods produce an approximate Gaussian curvature distribution which is then vectorized and classified by logistic regression. Two training data sets consisted of 88 and 674 polygons of mass-flow deposits, respectively. The locality of the polygon samples is a sparse canopy boreal forest, where the density of ALS ground returns is sufficiently high to reveal information about terrain micro-topography. The surface stoniness of each polygon sample was categorized for supervised learning by expert observation on the site. The leave-pair-out (L2O) cross-validation of the local linear fit method results in the area under curve AUC = 0.74 and AUC = 0.85 on two data sets, respectively. This performance can be expected to suit real world applications such as detecting coarse-grained sediments for infrastructure construction. A wall-to-wall predictor based on the study was demonstrated.



Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 11:50