FULL WAVEFORM ANALYSIS: ICESAT LASER DATA FOR LAND COVER CLASSIFICATIO N

Analysis of the full waveform return pulse of laser altimeter systems is exp ected to increase the possibilities and accuracy in well-known applications of laser altimetry like DTM generation, forestry and earth surf ace analysis. NASA’s ICESat Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) was launched in 2003 and acquires full waveform data a long profiles covering the entire earth. In this study, the possibility of using ICESat data for land-cover classification is investigated ov r the Netherlands using data obtained from September to November 2003. The method, that automatically analyzes raw wavefor ms, divides the footprints of the laser pulses in four categories: high vegetation (high trees or forest), urban, water, and bare land/low v egetation. First, Gaussian components are fitted to and then several parameters derived from the Gaussian decomposition are us ed for discriminating the land-cover layers. Finally, the accuracy of the land-cover classes is validated by computing a confusion matrix bas ed on the CORINE land cover database 2000 (CLC2000) covering the same study area. Using our method we get 73% accuracy o f classification.