Comparison of Filtering Algorithms for Rock Point Cloud Data

Over the past years, laser scanner has been frequently used in rock engineering. Several filters have been developed to extract bare-Earth points from point clouds while few filter for point cloud data of rock which is a special kind of point cloud. To find a suitable filtering method for rock points, a research is carried out to determine the characteristics and the performance of these filters and to identify directions for future research. In this paper, nine algorithms are analyzed qualitatively. Five of them are tested on the point cloud of rock and the performances are analyzed quantitatively. The performance of algorithms with local feature is better than others on average, but they have difficulty on filtering the root of vegetation which is close to the ground.