A new method for shoreline extraction from airborne LiDAR point clouds

Abstract

This work proposes a method for the extraction of shorelines from airborne LiDAR (light detection and ranging) point clouds. In the beginning, water bodies are removed based on the flatness clue. Then, boundaries of lands are extracted by using a new minimum-cost boundary model. Finally, false boundaries caused by man-made objects and vegetations are removed in the refinement step, and true boundaries are regarded as shorelines. The main contribution is that the cost of boundaries is calculated through an energy function and minimized by the proposed minimum-cost model globally. Evaluation on five experimental scenes shows that the proposed method achieves the completeness of 92.5% and correctness of 90.7%, which are promising results in the shoreline extraction.