LAUSR

Abstract Information derived from waveform decomposition of full-waveform light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data has been widely used in vegetation detection and three-dimensional urban terrain modeling to investigate and interpret the structural diversity of surface coverage. Most prevailing waveform decomposition methods involve only a single wavelength, but these methods do not apply to full-waveform multispectral LiDAR (FWMSL) systems that simultaneously acquire spectral and geometric information. In this paper, we propose a new multispectral waveform decomposition (MSWD) method in order to explore the potential advantages of the FWMSL system. Both simulated data and measured data from our FWMSL system were used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The coefficient of determination (R2), root mean square error (RMSE), and relative error (rRMSE) metrics suggest that the decomposition results derived from MSWD exhibit a comparable overall fitting accuracy as a single wavelength waveform decomposition (SWWD) method. We also propose a new evaluation indicator, relative neighbor distance error (RNDE), to represent the relative error in the distance between adjacent targets. The simulation results present clear superiority of MSWD over SWWD in terms of discovering weak or overlapping components and retrieving accurate waveform parameters. The experimental results demonstrated a considerable improvement in RNDE (0.0100–0.0610) over the prevailing SWWD method (0.0566–0.2833). Unlike SWWD, MSWD initializes waveform components using mutually complementary wavelengths thus delivering higher completeness and accuracy. MSWD can be extended to other FWMSL or full-waveform hyperspectral LiDAR systems with additional wavelengths.