A Robust Deconvolution Method of Airborne LiDAR Waveforms for Dense Point Clouds Generation in Forest

Abstract

The generation of dense and accurate point clouds from airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) waveform data is crucial to forest inventory. This work proposes a deconvolution method with: 1) an automatic stopping criterion to differentiate near-adjacent targets and 2) an iterative false subwaveform removal algorithm to remove outliers caused by noise. Synthetic waveforms with different overlap rates were processed using the proposed method, the Gaussian decomposition (GD) method, and the Richardson Lucy (RL) deconvolution method. Results showed that: 1) the number of subwaveforms detected by the proposed method is 9% higher than that of the RL and 20% higher than that of the GD when the overlap rates are larger than 0.6 and 2) the proposed method is of the smallest ground and peak distance errors. Results of the indoor experiment also show that the proposed method is superior in finding near targets meanwhile leading to small ground and peak distance error. Furthermore, the proposed method was tested by airborne waveforms from the Dagujia forest farm. The point cloud density acquired by the proposed method is 3% and 35% higher than that by the RL and GD method. Fewer outliers are produced by the proposed method. The number of individual trees extracted from the proposed point clouds is 22%, 51%, and 57% greater than those extracted from the RL, the GD, and the reference point clouds using the canopy height model-based method. Best individual tree extraction result is produced by the proposed method, especially for an area with small trees.