A Scanline-Based Sliding Window Filtering Method for UAV-Borne LiDAR Bathymetry Point Clouds

To improve the data quality of underwater point clouds acquired by UAV-borne LiDAR bathymetry, a scanline-based sliding window filtering method is proposed based on an analysis of scanline data characteristics. Scanline data of underwater point clouds are first extracted from raw point clouds, and the radius outlier removal algorithm is employed to eliminate outliers. Taking the acquisition time of scanline points as the X-axis and elevation as the Y-axis, a 3D problem is simplified into a 2D representation, and a sliding window is constructed along the scanline. Robust least-squares fitting is applied within the window. The median absolute deviation of the fitting residuals is adopted to calculate the terrain feature values for quantifying the terrain complexity, followed by an adaptive filtering threshold determination according to terrain feature values. Fine filtering of the individual scanlines is performed using a point-by-point sliding window. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is adaptable to various terrain conditions, achieving a noise recall rate ≥ 96%, an overall filtering accuracy ≥99%, and an F1-score ≥ 0.9. Particularly, the precision rate in flat-water areas reached 97.37%. Overall, the proposed filtering method effectively separates noise points while preserving detailed terrain features and supports UAV-borne LiDAR bathymetry for mapping complex shallow-water regions.