Field tree measurement using terrestrial laser for radar remote sensing

To validate the result of radar image, accurate field reference data is required. Since the field data is limited and not accurate enough to satisfy the result from high resolution radar data, accurate measurement technique using terrestrial laser is introduced in this paper. The terrestrial laser data is dense and complex point distribution. The voxel representation technique is used to simplify and identify the tree structure. And the vertical distribution is normalized from the voxel to use as the percentile height and the normalized percentile height identifies the effect of volume scattering of radar. As the result, the terrain slope and the portion of canopy (80, 70, 50, 10 percentile height) are significantly related with the backscattering coefficient sigma value. The detail three dimensional structures obtained from the terrestrial laser helps to understand the volume scattering mechanism of tree structure.