Organizing Lidar Data Based on Octree Structure

Laser scanned lidar data record 3D surface information in detail. Exploring valuable spatial information from lidar data is a prerequisite task for its applications, such as DEM generation and 3D building model reconstruction. However, the inherent spatial information is implicit in the abundant, densely and randomly distributed point cloud. This paper proposes a novel method to organize point cloud data, so that further analysis or feature extraction can proceed based on a well organized data model. The principle of the proposed algorithm is to segment point cloud into 3D planes. A split and merge segmentation based on the octree structure is developed for the implementation. Some practical airborne and ground lidar data are tested for demonstration and discussion. We expect this data organization could provide a stepping stone for extracting spatial information from lidar data.