Airborne LiDAR bathymetry (ALB) has been shown to have the ability to retrieve water turbidity using the waveform parameters (i.e., slopes and amplitudes) of volume backscatter returns. However, directly and accurately extracting the parameters of volume backscatter returns from raw green-pulse waveforms in shallow waters is difficult because of the short waveform. This study proposes a new acc...

LiDAR systems have been established as technology for fast and high-resolution acquisition of 3D point clouds. In general, LiDAR data acquisition is conducted by private companies who are also responsible for processing and quality control. However, in many cases a subsequent quality assessment of overlapping LiDAR strips still reveals apparent horizontal and vertical offsets which are caused b...

Full-waveform LiDAR is an active remote sensing technique that provides the scattering properties of the targets i.e. amplitude and echo width (EW) in addition to 3D point clouds. The amplitude provides information on the target's reflectance and the EW is a measure for the range variation of scatterers within the laser footprint contributing to a single echo and is, therefore, an indicator for...

Given sufficient data storage capacity, today’s full-waveform LiDAR systems are able to record and store the entire laser pulse echo signal. This provides the possibility of further analyzing the physical characteristics of the reflecting objects. However the size of the captured data is enormous and currently not practical. Thus arises the need for compressing the waveform data. We have develo...

In contrast to conventional airborne multi-echo laser scanner systems, full-waveform (FW) lidar systems are able to record the entire emitted and backscattered signal of each laser pulse. Instead of clouds of individual 3D points, FW devices provide connected 1D profiles of the 3D scene, which contain more detailed and additional information about the structure of the illuminated surfaces. This...

A topic of recurring interest in ecological research is the degree to which vegetation structure influences the distribution and abundance of species. Here we test the applicability of remote sensing, particularly novel use of waveform lidar measurements, for quantifying the habitat heterogeneity of a contiguous northern hardwoods forest in the northeastern United States. We apply these results...

[1] Large footprint waveform-recording laser altimeters (lidars) have demonstrated a potential for accurate remote sensing of forest biomass and structure, important for regional and global climate studies. Currently, radiative transfer analyses of lidar data are based on the simplifying assumption that only single scattering contributes to the return signal, which may lead to errors in the mod...