Abstract
Abstract. This paper describes the possibilities of the Optech Titan multispectral airborne laser scanner in the fields of mapping and forestry. Investigation was targeted to six land cover classes. Multispectral laser scanner data can be used to distinguish land cover classes of the ground surface, including the roads and separate road surface classes. For forest inventory using point cloud metrics and intensity features combined, total accuracy of 93.5% was achieved for classification of three main boreal tree species (pine, spruce and birch).When using intensity features – without point height metrics - a classification accuracy of 91% was achieved for these three tree species. It was also shown that deciduous trees can be further classified into more species. We propose that intensity-related features and waveform-type features are combined with point height metrics for forest attribute derivation in area-based prediction, which is an operatively applied forest inventory process in Scandinavia. It is expected that multispectral airborne laser scanning can provide highly valuable data for city and forest mapping and is a highly relevant data asset for national and local mapping agencies in the near future.
Highlights
During the last 10 years, intensity calibration of Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) has progressed from a research idea into an operational practise in ALS systems
Our preliminary analyses suggest that the new data are very promising for further increasing the automation level in mapping, and large variety of single-sensor applications are seen possible
Matikainen et al (2016) concluded that Optech Titan multispectral ALS data over a suburban area in Finland are useful for land cover classification, when considering ground surface objects and classes, such as roads, and reaching an estimate for classification error about 3% for separating classes asphalt, gravel, rocky areas and low vegetation from each other
Summary
During the last 10 years, intensity calibration of Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) has progressed from a research idea into an operational practise in ALS systems. The need for radiometric calibration of the laser scanning (LS) intensity stems from the possibility of using calibrated intensity as an additional feature for object classification and object characteristics estimation. The major motivation was that “someday, there will be multispectral airborne laser scanning” available and single-sensor applications are possible without the need of merging ALS and passive imaging data. Our paper reviews first the previous intensity calibration work from the perspective of near future multispectral ALS. What does it mean for the multispectral ALS? Our preliminary analyses suggest that the new data are very promising for further increasing the automation level in mapping, and large variety of single-sensor applications are seen possible
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