Mapping the Shallow Water Seabed Habitat With the SHOALS

The Scanning Hydrographic Operational Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) Survey (SHOALS) consists of a bathymetric LiDAR system that provides high-precision measurements of water depth. Although the acquisition is focused on depth accuracy, the return signal, i.e., waveform, contains other relevant information because of integration signatures from the water surface, the water column, and the seabed. This paper highlights the benthic characterization in extracting statistical parameters derived from the bottom backscatter and classifying them. In implementing a specific unsupervised classification, it is significantly proven that the signals derived from habitat, described as statistically homogeneous throughout ground-truth analysis, are similar within an intrahabitat view, whereas they are different between themselves.

扫描水文作业机载光探测和测距（LiDAR）测量（SHOALS）由一个测深LiDAR系统组成，该系统可提供高精度的水深测量。尽管采集侧重于深度精度，但由于来自水面、水柱和海床的综合特征，返回信号（即波形）包含其他相关信息。本文强调了在提取从海底反向散射得出的统计参数并对其进行分类时的海底特征描述。在实施一种特定的无监督分类时，显著证明了来自栖息地的信号（在整个地面实况分析中被描述为统计上均匀的）在栖息地内部的视角下是相似的，而它们之间是不同的。