I'm trying to develop a workflow in ArcGIS with 3D Analyst or Spatial Analyst to intelligently thin a grid of spot elevation points created from a LiDAR DEM. The current point spacing is 1 meter. Some CAD software packages have tools to do this kind of thinning directly on a TIN surface, but I would like to port that functionality into ArcGIS. I'm guessing the workflow would involve some kind of nearest neighbor analysis.
What I would like to do is intelligently thin a grid of points to remove points in areas of redundant elevations. For example, a large parking lot may contain 200 points whose elevations are all within 0.25' of each other. This parking lot's elevations could instead be accurately represented in the surface with maybe 10 points.
The workflow would aim to eliminate neighboring points with similar elevations to reduce the overall number of points in the spot elevation grid. User controls would decide what the height and distance thresholds are to determine whether to remove points. Following the thinning, these spot elevations would get fed into a TIN.
