Discriminating Vegetation

from Buildings
Posted on October 23, 2014 by martin isenburg
I came across an interesting blog article by Jarlath ONeil-Dunne from the University of
Vermont on how LiDAR return information can be used as a simple way to discriminate
vegetated areas from buildings. He first computes a normalized first-return DSM and
a normalized last-return DSM that he subtracts from another to highlight the vegetation. He
writes This is because the height difference of the first and last returns for buildings is often
identical, whereas for trees it is typically much greater.
Side note: I am not entirely happy with the terminology of a Normalized Digital Terrain
Model (nDTM). Jarlath writes: A similar approach is used to create a Normalized Digital
Terrain Model (nDTM). A DTM is generated from the last returns. The DEM is then
subtracted from the DTM to create the nDTM. I like to reserve the term Digital Terrain
Model (DTM) for bare-earth terrain computed from returns classified as ground.

Below I radically simplify Jarlath workflow by eliminating the two normalization steps. This
not only saves the creation of 3 temporary rasters but also removes the requirement to have
ground-classified LiDAR:

1. Create a first-return frDSM

2. Create a last-return lrDSM
3. Subtract the lrDSM from the frDSM to get a return-difference rdDEM
This rdDEM has non-zero heights in all areas where the LiDAR produced more than one
return. This happens most often and most pronounced in vegetated areas. Here is how to
implement this with las2dem of LAStools:
las2dem -i ..\data\fusa.laz -first_only -o frDSM.bil

las2dem -i ..\data\fusa.laz -last_only -o lrDSM.bil

lasdiff -i frDSM.bil -i lrDSM.bil -o rdDEM.laz

lasview -i rdDEM.laz
 The return-difference rdDEM shows the height difference between first and last
returns.
Does this work well for you? The results on the fusa.laz data set are not entirely convincing
maybe because the vegetation was too dense (leaf-on?) so that the LiDAR penetration is
not as pronounced. You can switch back and forth between the first-return and the last-return
DSM by loading both *.bil files into lasview with the -files_are_flightlines option and then
press hotkeys 0 and 1 to toggle between the points and t to triangulate the selected DSM.
lasview -i frDSM.bil lrDSM.bil -files_are_flightlines
first-return DSM

last-return DSM
We should point out that for Jarlath the return difference raster rdDEM is just one part of the
pipeline that is followed by an object-based approach in which they integrate the spectral
information from aerial imagery and then use iterative expert systems to further improve the
tree canopy classification.

Nevertheless, we believe that our way of classifying vegetation and buildings via a pipeline
of lasground, lasheight, and lasclassify gives a better and more robust initial guess than multi-
return height differences towards what is vegetation and what are buildings. Below you see
this is implemented using the new LASlayers concept:
lasground -i ..\data\fusa.laz -city -extra_fine -olay

lasheight -i ..\data\fusa.laz -ilay -olay

lasclassify -i ..\data\fusa.laz -ilay -olay

lasview -i ..\data\fusa.laz -ilay

Automated building and vegetation classification with lasclassify.

Using lasgrid there are many ways that can easily turn the classified point cloud into a raster
so that it can be used for subsequent exploitation together with other image data using a raster
processing software. An example is shown below.
lasgrid -i ..\data\fusa.laz -ilay -keep_class 5 ^

-step 0.5 -subcircle 0.1 -occupancy -fill 1 -false ^

 -use_bb -o vegetation.tif

lasgrid -i ..\data\fusa.laz -ilay -keep_class 6 ^

-step 0.5 -subcircle 0.1 -occupancy -fill 1 -gray ^

-use_bb -o buildings.tif

gdalwarp vegetation.tif buildings.tif classified.tif

Alternatively we can use lasboundary to create a shapefile describing either the vegetation or
the buildings.
lasboundary -i ..\data\fusa.laz -ilay -keep_class 5 ^

-disjoint -concavity 1.5 -o vegetation.shp

lasboundary -i ..\data\fusa.laz -ilay -keep_class 6 ^

-disjoint -concavity 1.5 -o buildings.shp

SHP file generated with lasboundary with polygons describing the vegetation.
SHP file generated with lasboundary with polygons describing the buildings.