With the explosive growth in the density of acquired point cloud data, point cloud processing tasks will face tremendous challenges. LiDAR point cloud simplification is a key phase in addressing this issue, which effectively promotes the development of LiDAR technology in many engineering fields. In this study, an innovative point cloud simplification algorithm with the fuzzy encoding-decoding mechanism is proposed. In the developed scheme, an approach for curvature estimation is first designed on the basis of the k-neighbor searching and principal component analysis. Then, a collection of feature point sets is set up with the ordered curvatures. Subsequently, a Fuzzy C-Means clustering based encoding mechanism is employed to capture the level point cloud structures in depth and establish a reasonable and streamlined strategy for point clouds. Each feature point set and non-feature point set are encoded into a prototype matrix and a partition (membership) matrix. The membership degree of each feature point to its prototype becomes the basis for the simplification strategy. Finally, the simplification result of the point cloud is formed through merging the simplification results of all subsets. The method proposed in this study effectively preserves the point cloud features and ensures a uniform distribution of the simplified point cloud. A comparative analysis of the point cloud simplification is conducted. The experimental results demonstrate that the developed algorithm outperformed other point cloud simplification algorithms.

National Key Research & Development Program of China National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) China Postdoctoral Science Foundation Shaanxi Fundamental Science Research Project for Mathematics and Physics