Averaging Elevations Between Crop Rows Furrows and Beds

In some elevation modelling the desire may be for averaging the elevations between the furrows and beds of crop rows.

1. If only the beds are classified as ground, you can use a height segmentation PCT to classify the furrows to ground or to a separate class. The height segmentation should be set to filter from ground (zero) to the height of the tallest furrows but not high enough to classify any vegetation.
2. Create a Grid Generator type PCT, set the cell size to the desired sample interval of the surface to be created. Set the Grid Output Type to 3D Points. If you wish to only create this grid over cropland and exclude other areas create a cropland boundary as a polygon, select the Input Geometry Clipping option to Clip to Input Geometry and use that as the input geometry and use the Execute Point Cloud Task Using Feature Layer tool. Set an output location for the shapefile to be created.
3. Create a Conflation type PCT, The Source Points will be ground class or the ground plus the furrows class. The conflation method will be Summarize Z, click the ellipsis (…) to open the Summarize Z Values dialog. The options should be set for Average Z. The Spatial Relationship should be “within a distance of” and the value should be between 1.5x or 2x the average distance between furrows. The output shape file will be the generated product with averaged elevations, where the averaging is of the elevations between the furrows and beds of the crop rows. Execute the point cloud task using the Execute Point Cloud Task using a Feature Layer and use the 3D generated grid as the input.
4. Export the generated average grid as another format if shapefiles are not preferred.
5. If the cropland area needs to be recombined with the rest of the project, there are numerous ways to accomplish this. One example would be to use a cropland boundary polygon to execute a basic filter PCT to move all points within the cropland area to custom classes. For example, 2-Ground could be moved to 32-CroplandGround and 0-Unclassified could be moved to 30-CroplandUnclassified. You can then export a point cloud that excludes cropland custom classes. After that the cropland and non-cropland data could be merged or delivered separately.