Generating a DTM from Dense-

Matching Photogrammetry
Posted on June 13, 2014 by martin isenburg
Point clouds from dense-matching photogrammetry are popular. Stored in the LAS format
or its compressed LAZ twin these near-LiDAR points are easily ingested into LiDAR
processing software to, for example, generate a Digital Surface Model (DSM).
Can LAStools also create a Digital Terrain Model (DTM) from such data? is a question we
often get asked by private email or via the LAStools user forum. At INTERGEO Euroasia
2014 we gave a demo of this at the UltraCam booth. We repeated this demo with different
data at the Pix4D booth during the Geospatial World Forum 2014. Now the folks
from Visionmap have also become curious

Above the topography_cadastre_switzerland_densified.las point cloud we got at

the Pix4D booth. You may have already seen this colorized point cloud at some
other Pix4D event. The original points were in a highly incoherent spatial order that negativly
affected all subsequent processing. Therefore we first use lassort to reorder the points into a
space-filling Hilbert curve. At the same time we rescale the coordinate resolution to
centimeters and compress the file into the LAZ format.
lassort -i topography_cadastre_switzerland_densified.las ^

-rescale 0.01 0.01 0.01 -olaz

Next we use lasground to classify the ground points with options -city and -ultra_fine. The
option -city is a convenient short-hand for -step 25 that will remove all objects on the
terrain that have an extend of 25 meters or less. The option -ultra_fine instructs lasground to
spend more time on finding a good initial ground estimate. The option -odix _g add the
appendix _g to the output file name.
lasground -i topography_cadastre_switzerland_densified.laz ^

-city -ultra_fine ^

-odix _g -olaz

Above you see only the points that were classified as ground (classification 2) and below you
see how triangulating these points interpolates the voids where buildings and vegetation used
to be.
Now we use las2dem to raster a DTM from only those points that were classified as ground.
The option -step 0.5 sets the output grid resolution to 0.5 meters, -ocut 2 removes the _g
from the file name, -odix _dtm adds the appendix _dtm to the file name, and -obil
chooses BIL as the output raster format.
las2dem -i topography_cadastre_switzerland_densified_g.laz ^

-keep_class 2 -thin_with_grid 0.125 -extra_pass ^

-step 0.5 ^

-ocut 2 -odix _dtm -obil

For comparison we also use las2dem to create the corresponding DSM. The option -
thin_with_grid 0.125 makes the density of the points that are triangulated into a TIN more
compatible with the 0.5 by 0.5 grid that the TIN is rastered with by keeping only the first
point that falls within each 0.125 by 0.125 area or a maximum of 16 points per 0.5 by 0.5
raster cell. The option -extra_pass counts all surviving points in a first pass to minimize the
memory footprint needed for Delaunay TIN construction.
las2dem -i topography_cadastre_switzerland_densified_g.laz ^

-thin_with_grid 0.125 -extra_pass ^

-step 0.5 ^

-ocut 2 -odix _dsm -obil

Did you know that lasview can visualize BIL files via on-the-fly conversion from grids to
points? Above you see the generated DTM and below the corresponding DSM. So
yes, LAStools can create DTMs from points that are result of dense-matching
photogrammetry under one assumption: there is not too much vegetation.