Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Rockfall Detection From Terrestrial Lidar Point Clouds: A Clustering Approach Using R, Marj Tonini, Antonio Abellan

Journal of Spatial Information Science

In this study we analyzed a series of terrestrial LiDAR point clouds acquired over a cliff in Puigcercos (Catalonia Spain). The objective was to detect and extract individual rockfall events that occurred during a time span of six months and to investigate their spatial distribution. To this end local and global cluster algorithms were applied. First we used the nearest neighbor clutter removal (NNCR) method in combination with the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to separate feature points from clutter; then a density based algorithm (DBSCAN) allowed us to isolate the single cluster features which represented the rockfall events. Finally we estimated …