Outlier Detection from High Sensitive Geiger Mode Imaging LIDAR Data retaining a High Outlier Ratio

Point clouds acquired by a LIDAR(Light Detection And Ranging, also LADAR) system often contain erroneous points called outliers seeming not to be on physical surfaces, which should be carefully detected and eliminated before further processing for applications. Particularly in case of LIDAR systems employing with a Gieger-mode array detector (GmFPA) of high sensitivity, the outlier ratio is significantly high, which makes existing algorithms often fail to detect the outliers from such a data set. In this paper, we propose a method to discriminate outliers from a point cloud with high outlier ratio acquired by a GmFPA LIDAR system. The underlying assumption of this method is that a meaningful targe surface occupy at least two adjacent pixels and the ranges from these pixels are similar. We applied the proposed method to simulated LIDAR data of different point density and outlier ratio and analyzed the performance according to different thresholds and data properties. Consequently, we found that the outlier detection probabilities are about 99% in most cases. We also confirmed that the proposed method is robust to data properties and less sensitive to the thresholds. The method will be effectively utilized for on-line realtime processing and post-processing of GmFPA LIDAR data.