Tree height inversion combining light detection and ranging and optical remote sensing data

Abstract

Tree barriers in transmission line corridors are an important safety hazard.Scientific prediction of tree height and monitoring tree height changes are essential to solve this hidden danger. In this paper, the advantages of airborne lidar and optical remote sensing data are combined to research the method of tree height inversion. Based on glas data of lidar,waveform parameters such as waveform length, waveform leading edge length and waveform trailing edge length were extracted from waveform data by gaussian decomposition method.Terrain feature parameters were extracted from aster gdem data.The tree crown information was extracted from the optical remote sensing image by means of the mean shift algorithm. Then extract the vegetation index with high correlation with tree height.Finally, the extracted waveform feature parameters, topographic feature parameters, and crown index and vegetation index with high correlation are used as model input variables. The tree height inversion model was established using four regression methods, including multiple linear regression (mlr), support vector machine (svm), random forest (rf), and bp neural network (bpnn). The accuracy evaluation was conducted, and it was concluded that the tree height inversion model based on random forest obtained the best accuracy effect.