Visualization and Analysis of Full-waveform Airborne Laser Scanner Data

Recent development of airborne laser scanner systems allows for digitization and recording of the full-waveform, i.e. the received signal of the reflected laser pulse. In this paper, some visualizations and analysis of waveform data are presented. The purpose is to study how waveform data can be used to extract additional information. As a first step, 3D point data are extracted and parameterized. The approach for extracting 3D point data is based on unsupervised learning where a mixture of Gaussian distributions are fitted to the waveforms to detect the peaks using the EM algorithm. The performance of this approach is compared to the real-time processing echo extraction by the system. The number of points extracted per waveform is studied and examples will illustrate where additional points have been extracted. * Corresponding author.