Influence of Varying Landforms and Flight Geometry on Echo Attributes of Full-waveform Airborne Laser Scanning Data

Full-waveform airborne laser scanning systems provide fundamental observations for each echo, such as echo width and amplitude. It is rarely to use amplitude for interpretation of point clouds due to its strong variability with different factors. A normalization process is usually applied. This study carried out a factorial experiment to investigate the effects of varying landforms and flight geometry on the echo width. The three factors of interest are surface roughness, surface orientation with respect to the sensor system, and flight altitude. The response of the experiment is the mean and standard deviation of the echo width. It was found that the three factors significantly affect the echo width and roughness is the most influential factor. Nevertheless, for the response of the standard deviation, only the main effect of roughness and its interaction effect with surface orientation and altitude have significant influences.