Forest Canopy Height Extraction in Rugged Areas With ICESat/GLAS Data

Author(s): Xiaoyi Wang, Huabing Huang, Peng Gong, Caixia Liu, Congcong Li, and Wenyu Li

Abstract—Geoscience Laser Altimeter System (GLAS) data have been widely used in forest canopy height extraction. It is still challenging over rugged areas. In this paper, we propose a forest canopy height extraction method consisting of Savitzky–Golay filter and fitting, Sigbeg determination based on the fitting results, and slope correction for rugged areas especially for slopes ranging from 5 o to 15 o. The method was applied to both Xinlin Forest, China and Santa Rosa National Park, Costa Rica. The performance of this method was validated by field measurement and LVIS data. Goodness of fit ( ) reached 0.73 and 0.78 respectively, and root mean squared errors (RMSE) were 2.27 m and 3.75 m, respectively, over the two areas.