Ground Level Recovery from Terrestrial Laser Scanning Data with the Variably Randomized Iterated Hierarchical Hough Transform

The planar digital terrain model to be used in the analysis of forest measurements made with terrestrial LIDAR scanning is proposed for regions dominated by plains. The structure of the data suggests that the iterated version of the Hough transform is a suitable method. This makes it possible to reduce the time and memory requirements of the method. Randomization with the fraction of data used varying with distance to the scanner is proposed to address the biasing of the result towards the measurements which are made with higher density in the central part of the stand. Using this method instead of weighted voting reduces the time of analysis. Hierarchical approach leads to further reduction of time. The method can be extended to models formed from more than one plane.