Application of the deconvolution method in the processing of Full-waveform Lidar data

Full-Waveform Lidar (light detection and ranging) records the entire backscatter signals of each emitted pulse, which is benefit to know the surface features. Full-waveform Lidar has strong ability in detecting the vertical structure of vegetation and terrain. The location or height information can be extracted from the received waveform. Most common extraction techniques may be invalid sometimes, such as Gaussian decomposition will be invalid when the received signal cannot be composed of pure Gaussian function combinations. In the application of processing returned signal, the method of deconvolution has the unique advantages in extracting parameters of position, amplitude range and height. It has been widely used in spectroscopy, signal recovery, signal analysis, signal modeling and so on. In this study, deconvolution was used to remove the characteristic of the transmitted waveform form the received waveform to obtain a surface response. The simulated waveforms were used to investigate the potential of deconvolution in Full-waveform Lidar data analysis. The results showed that the Gold´s method of deconvolution was suitable for solving the problem.