Waveform Decomposition of Airborne Bathymetric LiDAR by Estimating Potential Peaks

The waveform data of the Airborne Bathymetric LiDAR (ABL; LiDAR: Light Detection And Ranging) system provides data with improved accuracy, resolution, and reliability compared to the discrete-return data, and increases the user's control over data processing. Furthermore, we are able to extract additional information about the return signal. Waveform decomposition is a technique that separates each echo from the received waveform with a mixture of water surface and seabed reflections, waterbody backscattering, and various noises. In this study, a new waveform decomposition technique based on a Gaussian model was developed to improve the point extraction performance from the ABL waveform data. In the existing waveform decomposition techniques, the number of decomposed echoes and decomposition performance depend on the peak detection results because they use waveform peaks as initial values. However, in the study, we improved the approximation accuracy of the decomposition model by adding the estimated potential peak candidates to the initial peaks. As a result of an experiment using waveform data obtained from the East Coast from the Seahawk system, the precision of the decomposition model was improved by about 37% based on evaluating RMSE compared to the Gaussian decomposition method.