UAV-Borne LiDAR Crop Point Cloud Enhancement Using Grasshopper Optimization and Point Cloud Up-Sampling Network

• Main Authors: Jian Chen, Zichao Zhang, Kai Zhang, Shubo Wang, Yu Han
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-10-01
• Series: Remote Sensing
• Subjects: UAV-borne LiDAR scanning system; grasshopper optimization algorithm; GPS/INS integrated navigation; point cloud up-sampling network (PU-net); clustering segmentation; 3-dimensional reconstruction
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/12/19/3208

Because of low accuracy and density of crop point clouds obtained by the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-borne Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) scanning system of UAV, an integrated navigation and positioning optimization method based on the grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA) and a point cloud density enhancement method were proposed. Firstly, a global positioning system (GPS)/inertial navigation system (INS) integrated navigation and positioning information fusion method based on a Kalman filter was constructed. Then, the GOA was employed to find the optimal solution by iterating the system noise variance matrix Q and measurement noise variance matrix R of Kalman filter. By feeding the optimal solution into the Kalman filter, the error variances of longitude were reduced to 0.00046 from 0.0091, and the error variances of latitude were reduced to 0.00034 from 0.0047. Based on the integrated navigation, an UAV-borne LiDAR scanning system was built for obtaining the crop point. During offline processing, the crop point cloud was filtered and transformed into WGS-84, the density clustering algorithm improved by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm was employed to the clustering segment. After the clustering segment, the pre-trained Point Cloud Up-Sampling Network (PU-net) was used for density enhancement of point cloud data and to carry out three-dimensional reconstruction. The features of the crop point cloud were kept under the processing of reconstruction model; meanwhile, the density of the crop point cloud was quadrupled.