Abstract: The extraction of points on the bare earth from point cloud acquired by airborne laser scanning is one of the most important steps for the generation of DTM,and the relative processing is called "filtering".However,most of current filters erode the bare earth in steep sloped landscapes and at discontinuities,and that they retain low vegetation.Therefore,a new filtering method based on distance-limited is proposed for extracting ground points.The angle criterion is used to assure the robustness of the algorithm.The experimental results show that the proposed filtering method could effectively derive the ground points from point cloud in complex urban areas.