Tree height is a critical indicator for estimating forest stock and can be effectively acquired by UAV-LiDAR. Ground filtering works to classify ground points and non-ground points and can impact the tree height extraction results, while the points classification quality obtained by ordinary filtering methods is limited in complex forest conditions. A partitioned cloth simulation filtering (PCSF) method based on different vegetation cover was proposed in this study to improve the classification accuracy, and tree heights were extracted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. UAV-LiDAR data and field measurements collected from the Lutou experimental forest farm in the southern subtropical forest region of China were used for validation, and the slope-based filtering, progressive triangulated irregular network densification filtering (PTD), moving surface fitting filtering (MSFF), and CSF were adopted for comparisons. The results showed that the proposed method yielded the best ground filtering effect, reducing the filtering total error by 2.12%–4.22% compared with other methods, and the relative root mean squared error (rRMSE) of extracted tree heights was reduced by 1.24%–3.84%, respectively. The proposed method can achieve a satisfactory filtering effect and tree height extraction result, which provides a methodological basis to precisely extract tree heights in large-scale forests.
Ma et al. (Thu,) studied this question.