An Improved Skewness Balancing Filtering Algorithm Based on Thin Plate Spline Interpolation

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.