A Two-Stage Approach for Decomposition of ICESat Waveforms

Decomposing a waveform into distinct components by fitting a mixture of Gaussians impacts the ultimate interpretation of the return waveform, because the resulting parameter estimates of the Gaussian mixture directly affect the understanding of vertical structure within laser footprints. Decomposing the waveform into a mixture of Gaussians involves two related problems; (1) determining the number of Gaussian components in the waveform, and (2) estimating the parameters of each Gaussian component of the mixture. In this study, a two-stage approach is proposed and applied over three areas with different land cover characteristics. Experimental results indicate that the proposed two-stage approach typically fits Gaussian mixtures over received waveforms using fewer components, while the SSE value is smaller than that of the corresponding NASA GLA14 product.