Abstract
Abstract. The geoscience laser altimeter system (GLAS) on the board Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat), is the first long-duration space borne full-waveform LiDAR for measuring the topography of the ice shelf and temporal variation, cloud and atmospheric characteristics. In order to extract the characteristic parameters of the waveform, the key step is to process the full waveform data. In this paper, the modified waveform decomposition method is proposed to extract the echo components from full-waveform. First, the initial parameter estimation is implemented through data preprocessing and waveform detection. Next, the waveform fitting is demonstrated using the Levenberg-Marquard (LM) optimization method. The results show that the modified waveform decomposition method can effectively extract the overlapped echo components and missing echo components compared with the results from GLA14 product. The echo components can also be extracted from the complex waveforms.
Highlights
Full-waveform light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is an active remote sensing technology, in which a laser source transmits short laser pulses towards objects
The waveform LiDAR can be classified as a large footprint system such as the Laser Vegetation Imaging Sensor (LVIS) and the Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) and a small footprint system (0.2-3 m) such as RIEGL LMS-Q560 and Optech ALTM3100 (Mallet and Bretar, 2009)
The results show that, compared with the waveform parameters from GLA14, the decomposition method proposed in this study effectively extracted the overlapped echo components of received waveform, especially for the echo components corresponding with high degree of waveform overlapping (Figure 1 and Figure 2), the quantitative statistic of the comparison results in figure 1 and figure 2 are given by table 1 and table 2 respectively
Summary
Full-waveform light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is an active remote sensing technology, in which a laser source transmits short laser pulses towards objects. A full-waveform echo is the superposition of multiple echo components scattered by multiple objects or surfaces at different distances within one laser footprint (Xu et al, 2016). The geometric and physical properties of the objects can be obtained Such as the elevations, roughness, slope, forest canopy structure metrics and so on. Waveform decomposition is a key step for waveform LiDAR data processing. There are three main methods for decomposing the GLAS full waveform data, such as the Gaussian decomposition, waveform deconvolution (Neuenschwander et al, 2008; Duong, 2010), and wavelet analysis method (Wang et al, 2013). In order to effectively extract the echo components (especially for the overlapping echoes) from the complex waveforms, this study proposes a modified decomposition method to process the GLAS full waveform data.
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