Martínez Sánchez, JorgeFernández Rivera, FranciscoCabaleiro Domínguez, José CarlosLópez Vilariño, DavidFernández Pena, Anselmo Tomás2020-10-272020-10-272020Martínez Sánchez, J.; Fernández Rivera, F.; Cabaleiro Domínguez, J.C.; López Vilariño, D.; Fernández Pena, T. Automatic Extraction of Road Points from Airborne LiDAR Based on Bidirectional Skewness Balancing. Remote Sens. 2020, 12, 2025http://hdl.handle.net/10347/23451Road extraction from Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) has become a hot topic over recent years. Nevertheless, it is still challenging to perform this task in a fully automatic way. Experiments are often carried out over small datasets with a focus on urban areas and it is unclear how these methods perform in less urbanized sites. Furthermore, some methods require the manual input of critical parameters, such as an intensity threshold. Aiming to address these issues, this paper proposes a method for the automatic extraction of road points suitable for different landscapes. Road points are identified using pipeline filtering based on a set of constraints defined on the intensity, curvature, local density, and area. We focus especially on the intensity constraint, as it is the key factor to distinguish between road and ground points. The optimal intensity threshold is established automatically by an improved version of the skewness balancing algorithm. Evaluation was conducted on ten study sites with different degrees of urbanization. Road points were successfully extracted in all of them with an overall completeness of 93%, a correctness of 83%, and a quality of 78%. These results are competitive with the state-of-the-arteng© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Atribución 4.0 Internacionalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Airbone LiDAR point cloudsRoad point extractionBidirectional skewness balancingjournal article10.3390/rs121220252072-4292open access