Rule-based Classification of Airborne Laser Scanner Data for Automatic Extraction of 3D Objects in the Urban Area

LiDAR technology has been widely adopted as a proper method for land cover classification. Recently with the development of technology, LiDAR systems can now capture high-resolution multispectral bands images with high-density LiDAR point cloud simultaneously. Therefore, it opens new opportunities for more precise automatic land-use classification methods by utilizing LiDAR data. This article introduces a combining technique of point cloud classification algorithms. The algorithms include ground detection, building detection, and close point classification - the classification is based on point clouds’ attributes. The main attributes are heigh, intensity, and NDVI index calculated from 4 bands of colors extracted from multispectral images for each point. Data of the Leica City Mapper LiDAR system in an area of 80 ha in Quang Xuong town, Thanh Hoa province, Vietnam was used to deploy the classification. The data is classified into eight different types of land use consist of asphalt road, other ground, low vegetation, medium vegetation, high vegetation, building, water, and other objects. The classification workflow was implemented in the TerraSolid suite, with the result of the automation process came out with 97% overall accuracy of classification points. The classified point cloud is used in a workflow to create a 3D city model LoD2 (Level of Detail) afterward.