Feature Selection and Mislabeled Waveform Correction for Water–Land Discrimination Using Airborne Infrared Laser

The discrimination of water–land waveforms is a critical step in the processing of airborne topobathy LiDAR data. Waveform features, such as the amplitudes of the infrared (IR) laser waveforms of airborne LiDAR, have been used in identifying water–land interfaces in coastal waters through waveform clustering. However, water–land discrimination using other IR waveform features, such as full width at half maximum, area, width, and combinations of different features, has not been evaluated and compared with other methods. Furthermore, false alarms often occur when water–land discrimination in coastal areas is conducted using IR laser waveforms because of environmental factors. This study provides an optimal feature for water–land discrimination using an IR laser by comparing the performance of different waveform features and proposes a dual-clustering method integrating K-means and density-based spatial clustering applications with noise algorithms to improve the accuracy of water–land discrimination through the clustering of waveform features and positions of IR laser spot centers. The proposed method is used for practical measurement with Optech Coastal Zone Mapping and Imaging LiDAR. Results show that waveform amplitude is the optimal feature for water–land discrimination using IR laser waveforms among the researched features. The proposed dual-clustering method can correct mislabeled water or land waveforms and reduce the number of mislabeled waveforms by 48% with respect to the number obtained through traditional K-means clustering. Water–land discrimination using IR waveform amplitude and the proposed dual-clustering method can reach an overall accuracy of 99.730%. The amplitudes of IR laser waveform and the proposed dual-clustering method are recommended for water–land discrimination in coastal and inland waters because of the high accuracy, resolution, and automation of the methods