Analysis of Land Cover Classification Using Multi-Wavelength LiDAR System

Abstract

The airborne multi-wavelength light detection and ranging (LiDAR) system measures different wavelengths simultaneously and usually includes two or more active channels in infrared and green to acquire both topographic and hydrographic information. The reflected multi-wavelength energy can also be used to identify different land covers based on physical properties of materials. This study explored the benefits of multi-wavelength LiDAR in object-based land cover classification, focusing on three major issues: (1) the evaluation of single- and multi-wavelength LiDARs for land cover classification; (2) the performance of spectral and geometrical features extracted from multi-wavelength LiDAR; and (3) the comparison of the vegetation index derived from active multi-wavelength LiDAR and passive multispectral images. The three-wavelength test data were acquired by Optech Titan in green, near-infrared, and mid-infrared channels, and the reference data were acquired from Worldview-3 image. The experimental results show that the multi-wavelength LiDAR provided higher accuracy than single-wavelength LiDAR in land cover classification, with an overall accuracy improvement rate about 4-14 percentage points. The spectral features performed better compared to geometrical features for grass, road, and bare soil classes, and the overall accuracy improvement is about 29 percentage points. The results also demonstrated the vegetation indices from Worldview-3 and Optech Titan have similar characteristics, with correlations reaching 0.68 to 0.89. Overall, the multi-wavelength LiDAR system improves the accuracy of land cover classification because this system provides more spectral information than traditional single-wavelength LiDAR.