Patent ID: 7304645

Claim:
A method for processing scenes comprising point data reflected from a space comprising a target, the method comprising: receiving telemetry and timing measurement data; computationally converting the telemetry and timing measurement data into three-dimensional angle-angle-range points and into an x-y-z coordinate space for producing a plurality of three-dimensional volume frames and coincident processing to produce a three-dimensional array of voxels as a plurality of frame files as a voxel array; processing the data within a noise filter by determining whether each voxel in the voxel array is an occupied voxel, an occupied voxel being a voxel containing point data; determining a hit count for each occupied voxel, wherein the hit count is a number of data points per voxel; determining for each occupied voxel, whether the hit count satisfies a hit threshold; writing to an output file those occupied voxels that meet a hit count threshold that is set using statistical or historic data on which the data points represent a reflection of a LADAR pulse beam so as to remove noise from the point data and produce filtered frames; spatially aligned filtered frames; performing a union of registered volumes to produce a union frame; and detecting a ground plane by analyzing a Z histogram of point data in a union frame and cropping the volume to produce a composite image for presentations to a user.