792
Views
0
CrossRef citations to date
0
Altmetric
Research Article

Denoising and classification of urban ICESat-2 photon data fused with Sentinel-2 spectral images

, , , , &
Pages 4346-4367 | Received 22 May 2023, Accepted 09 Oct 2023, Published online: 18 Oct 2023
 

ABSTRACT

The ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2) can collect earth surface elevation data with high precision on a global scale. However, the collected photon data contains a large amount of background noise due to the influence of sunlight, cloud reflection, and other factors. For photon data of different scenes, how to effectively denoise and achieve accurate classification of photon point clouds is crucial for subsequent applications. This study proposes a random forest based method for denoising and classifying ICESat-2 photon data in urban areas by fusing spectral features from Sentinel-2 images and spatial distribution features from photon data. The experimental results show that the method can effectively identify various types of photons. Compared with the reference data, the overall accuracy of photon denoising and classification is 95.97% on average, and the average kappa coefficient is 94.18%. Further analysis demonstrates that the addition of sentinel-2 spectral information can effectively improve the classification accuracy of photon point clouds in urban areas, and the photon classification method of combining photon lidar data and optical images can be a promising solution to improve classification accuracy.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all anonymous reviewers and editors for many constructive comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the State Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China–Key projects of joint fund for regional innovation and development [grant number U22A20566], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 42271365], and the Fundamental Re-search Funds for the Universities of Henan Province [grant number NSFRF220203].