Airborne laser scanning for terrain modeling in the Amazon forest

ABSTRACT Very few studies have been devoted to understanding the digital terrain model (DTM) creation for Amazon forests. DTM has a special and important role when airborne laser scanning is used to estimate vegetation biomass. We examined the influence of pulse density, spatial resolution, filter algorithms, vegetation density and slope on the DTM quality. Three Amazonian forested areas were surveyed with airborne laser scanning, and each original point cloud was reduced targeting to 20, 15, 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, 1, 0.75, 0.5 and 0.25 pulses per square meter based on a random resampling process. The DTM from resampled clouds was compared with the reference DTM produced from the original LiDAR data by calculating the deviation pixel by pixel and summarizing it through the root mean square error (RMSE). The DTM from resampled clouds were also evaluated considering the level of agreement with the reference DTM. Our study showed a clear trade-off between the return density and the horizontal resolution. Higher forest canopy density demanded higher return density or lower DTM resolution.