A Marked Point Process for Modeling Lidar Waveforms

Lidar waveforms are 1D signals representing a train of echoes caused by reflections at different targets. Modeling these echoes with the appropriate parametric function is useful to retrieve information about the physical characteristics of the targets. This paper presents a new probabilistic model based on a marked point process which reconstructs the echoes from recorded discrete waveforms as a sequence of parametric curves. Such an approach allows to fit each mode of a waveform with the most suitable function and to deal with both, symmetric and asymmetric, echoes. The model takes into account a data term, which measures the coherence between the models and the waveforms, and a regularization term, which introduces prior knowledge on the reconstructed signal. The exploration of the associated configuration space is performed by a Reversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler coupled with simulated annealing. Experiments with different kinds of lidar signals, especially from urba...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TIP
• Authors: Clément Mallet, Florent Lafarge, Michel Roux, Uwe Soergel, Frédéric Bretar, Christian Heipke
• Keywords: Appropriate Parametric Function, Education, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, TIP 2010, Waveforms