Automatic Construction of Aerial Corridor from Discrete LiDAR Point Cloud

Abstract

With the development of unmanned aerial systems (UASs), the lack of flight supervision mechanism and the related technical guidance in the airspace become a challenge for safety and privacy protection. In this paper, we present an automatic construction and visualization of airspace corridor from discrete LiDAR. In our method, DTM is generated with empirical decomposition method and the morphological operation and slope-based threshold, which provides an altitude-based upper zone in the space zoning. The detected non-ground objects and the boundary of the privacy-protected regions are used to construct the aerial corridor. To evaluate our proposed method, the ISPRS LiDAR datasets and a LiDAR dataset from Mustang Island were used. It was demonstrated that our proposed method improved the accuracy of delineation of the non-ground objects and improved the accuracy of DTM. Using DSM and DTM, the airspace is divided into the upper zone, safe zone, and takeoff/landing zone. The privacy sensitive regions were integrated into the zoning process and the route for UAS was planned automatically to avoid the private and restricted regions. The visualization technology was implemented to realize the construction of aerial corridor.