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Least Squares Compactly Supported Radial Basis Function for Digital Terrain Model Interpolation from Airborne Lidar Point Clouds

To overcome the huge volume problem of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data for the derivation of digital terrain models (DTMs), a least squares compactly supported radial basis function (CSRBF) interpolation method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method has a limited support radius and fewer RBF centers than the sample points, selected by a newly developed surface variation-based algorithm. Those make the linear system of the proposed method not only much sparser but also efficiently solvable. Tests on a synthetic dataset demonstrate that the proposed method is comparable to the smoothing RBF, and far superior to the exact RBF. Moreover, the first is much faster than the others. The proposed method with the RBF centers selected by the surface variation-based algorithm obviously outperforms that with the random selection of equal number. Real-world examples on one private and ten public datasets show that the surfaces of simple interpolation methods including inverse distance weighting, natural neighbor, linear and bicubic suffer from the problems of roughness, peak-cutting, discontinuity and subtle terrain feature loss, respectively. By contrast, the proposed method produces visually appealing results, keeping a good tradeoff between noise removal and terrain feature preservation. Additionally, the new method compares favorably with ordinary kriging (OK) for the generation of high-resolution DTMs in terms of interpolation accuracy, yet the former is much more robust to spatial resolution variation and terrain characteristics than the latter. More importantly, our method is about 4 times faster than OK. In conclusion, the proposed method has high potential for the interpolation of a large LiDAR dataset, especially when both interpolation accuracy and computational cost are taken into account.