Slope estimations in forest area from waveform and DEM

In this paper, a novel physical model and its mathematical expressions were used to estimate the average slope of land by using LVIS data, which was collected in mountain area, California, USA. The waveform data obtained from LVIS were used to validate the local slope within footprint. It was compared with the other two methods which were based on the mean elevation of land and the forest canopy height. For eliminating the variance between the method proposed in this paper and two compared method, the mean elevation of land was used to modify the result estimated by the method advanced above. Calculation results indicate that the method proposed in this paper can make a more accurate and average estimation for the local slope of land and slope estimation was not influenced by the forest canopy height too much.