Point Cloud Preprocessing on 3D LiDAR data for Unmanned Surface Vehicle in Marine Environment

Point cloud preprocessing is still a challenging task in the marine environment, for it is difficult to filter out non-obstacle points while avoiding damage to the obstacle completeness. In this paper, we propose a novel data preprocessing method on 3D LiDAR data for the unmanned surface vehicle in the marine environment. It consists of two tasks: outlier removal and wake filtering. As the spatial resolution of LiDAR changes with distance, we exploit distance normalization on statistical outlier filter for robust outlier removal. Considering the gradient difference between wave wake and obstacle surface near the water, we define and calculate the vertical state of point cloud on the range image to obtain the pre-filtering point set, and then use the RANSAC method to filter out the wake points. Experiments on real data has demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm both in terms of feasibility and accuracy.