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Full-waveform spaceborne laser altimeter can provide more characteristic parameters of the laser footprint and rich vertical structure information on the target surface. This technology has the potential for land-cover classification, especially in hard-to-reach mountain areas. Classifying the land types based on the returned waveform can provide a convenient way for the online classification needs and assess the quality of footprint used as the ground control point in photogrammetry. This article presents a random forest (RF) classification using geoscience laser altimeter system waveform, in the west-central Yunnan Province, China. First, an improved threshold wavelet is performed to denoise the waveform, and then Gaussian decomposition is used to extract the typical characteristic features of footprint. Second, an RF algorithm is implemented to clarify the footprints into five types: flat, building, terrace, forest, and mountain. Finally, quantitative analysis is conducted with producer's accuracy (PA), user's accuracy (UA), overall accuracy (OA), precision, recall rate, F1-score, and kappa coefficient to compare the performance of RF with other classifiers, including linear support vector machine (linear-SVM), radial basis function SVM (RBF-SVM), logistic regression (LR), K-nearest neighbor (KNN), and naive Bayes (NB). The results show that all the six methods can accurately classify the flat land with 100.00% PA and UA. The RF also has the best performances in other four land types, with PA and UA of 98.14% and 100.00%, 97.24% and 95.49%, 98.64% and 96.03%, and 94.64% and 100.00%, respectively. The OA, precision, recall, F1-score, and kappa coefficient for the RF are 97.95%, 97.73%, 98.30%, 97.99%, and 0.9737, respectively; while 83.45%, 82.55%, 82.98%, 81.16%, and 0.7765 for NB, which has the worst performance. LR performs better than RBF-SVM, linear-SVM, and KNN. It also observes worse classification accuracy for all methods when the waveforms are more complex.

The formulas for error propagation from the random error sources to the three-dimensional (3-D) coordinate errors of laser footprints of an airborne laser scanning (ALS) system were deduced. Based on large-scale sample data, multiple linear regression experiments were carried out to obtain the standardized regression coefficients of the random errors for the 3-D coordinate errors under different flight heights (from 500 to 6000 m above ground level). The standardized regression coefficients were used to quantitatively evaluate the impacts of the random errors and to sort the impacts on the order of importance. The variation of the impacts of the random errors with increasing flight height and tilt angle of the mirror was also analyzed. The experimental results provide an important guide for error budget of various sensors in the ALS system so as to effectively suppress or compensate significant errors and to improve the performance of the ALS system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]