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Research | Open Access

Influence of voxel size on forest canopy height estimates using full-waveform airborne LiDAR data

Cheng Wang1,2, Shezhou Luo1( ), Xiaohuan Xi2, Sheng Nie2, Dan Ma1, Youju Huang3
College of Resources and Environment, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou 350002, China
Key Laboratory of Digital Earth Science, Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100094, China
Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region Institute of Natural Resources Remote Sensing, Nanning 530023, China
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Abstract

Background

Forest canopy height is a key forest structure parameter. Precisely estimating forest canopy height is vital to improve forest management and ecological modelling. Compared with discrete-return LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), small-footprint full-waveform airborne LiDAR (FWL) techniques have the capability to acquire precise forest structural information. This research mainly focused on the influence of voxel size on forest canopy height estimates.

Methods

A range of voxel sizes (from 10.0 m to 40.0 m interval of 2 m) were tested to obtain estimation accuracies of forest canopy height with different voxel sizes. In this study, all the waveforms within a voxel size were aggregated into a voxel-based LiDAR waveform, and a range of waveform metrics were calculated using the voxel-based LiDAR waveforms. Then, we established estimation model of forest canopy height using the voxel-based waveform metrics through Random Forest (RF) regression method.

Results and conclusions

The results showed the voxel-based method could reliably estimate forest canopy height using FWL data. In addition, the voxel sizes had an important influence on the estimation accuracies (R2 ranged from 0.625 to 0.832) of forest canopy height. However, the R2 values did not monotonically increase or decrease with the increase of voxel size in this study. The best estimation accuracy produced when the voxel size was 18 m (R2 = 0.832, RMSE = 2.57 m, RMSE% = 20.6%). Compared with the lowest estimation accuracy, the R2 value had a significant improvement (33.1%) when using the optimal voxel size. Finally, through the optimal voxel size, we produced the forest canopy height distribution map for this study area using RF regression model. Our findings demonstrate that the optimal voxel size need to be determined for improving estimation accuracy of forest parameter using small-footprint FWL data.

Keywords

ForestsVoxel sizeAirborne LiDARFull-waveformCanopy height

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Forest Ecosystems
Volume 7 Issue 3,
September 2020
Article number: 31
DOI: 10.1186/s40663-020-00243-2
Cite this article:
Wang C, Luo S, Xi X, et al. Influence of voxel size on forest canopy height estimates using full-waveform airborne LiDAR data. Forest Ecosystems, 2020, 7(3): 31. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40663-020-00243-2

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Received: 20 October 2019
Accepted: 24 April 2020
Published: 07 May 2020
© The Author(s) 2020.

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