{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,3,15]],"date-time":"2026-03-15T06:50:33Z","timestamp":1773557433359,"version":"3.50.1"},"reference-count":35,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"4","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2019,2,25]],"date-time":"2019-02-25T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1551052800000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"The National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["41506210"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["41506210"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"DOI":"10.13039\/501100001809","name":"The National Natural Science Foundation of China","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","award":["41801261"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["41801261"]}],"id":[{"id":"10.13039\/501100001809","id-type":"DOI","asserted-by":"publisher"}]},{"name":"the National Science and Technology Major Project","award":["11-Y20A12-9001-17\/18"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["11-Y20A12-9001-17\/18"]}]},{"name":"the National Science and Technology Major Project","award":["42-Y20A11-9001-17\/18"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["42-Y20A11-9001-17\/18"]}]},{"name":"the Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China","award":["2016M600612"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["2016M600612"]}]},{"name":"the Postdoctoral Science Foundation of China","award":["20170034"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["20170034"]}]},{"name":"the Youth Science and Technology Innovation Fund Project of Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Water Conservancy and Water Resources","award":["KY201703"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["KY201703"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Remote Sensing"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Airborne or space-borne photon-counting lidar can provide successive photon clouds of the Earth\u2019s surface. The distribution and density of signal photons are very different because different land cover types have different surface profiles and reflectance, especially in coastal areas where the land cover types are various and complex. A new adaptive signal photon detection method is proposed to extract the signal photons for different land cover types from the raw photons captured by the MABEL (Multiple Altimeter Beam Experimental Lidar) photon-counting lidar in coastal areas. First, the surface types with 30 m resolution are obtained via matching the geographic coordinates of the MABEL trajectory with the NLCD (National Land Cover Database) datasets. Second, in each along-track segment with a specific land cover type, an improved DBSCAN (Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) algorithm with adaptive thresholds and a JONSWAP (Joint North Sea Wave Project) wave algorithm is proposed and integrated to detect signal photons on different surface types. The result in Pamlico Sound indicates that this new method can effectively detect signal photons and successfully eliminate noise photons below the water level, whereas the MABEL result failed to extract the signal photons in vegetation segments and failed to discard the after-pulsing noise photons. In the Atlantic Ocean and Pamlico Sound, the errors of the RMS (Root Mean Square) wave height between our result and in-situ result are \u22120.06 m and 0.00 m, respectively. However, between the MABEL and in-situ result, the errors are \u22120.44 m and \u22120.37 m, respectively. The mean vegetation height between the East Lake and Pamlico Sound was also calculated as 15.17 m using the detecting signal photons from our method, which agrees well with the results (15.56 m) from the GFCH (Global Forest Canopy Height) dataset. Overall, for different land cover types in coastal areas, our study indicates that the proposed method can significantly improve the performance of the signal photon detection for photon-counting lidar data, and the detected signal photons can further obtain the water levels and vegetation heights. The proposed approach can also be extended for ICESat-2 (Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2) datasets in the future.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/rs11040471","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2019,2,25]],"date-time":"2019-02-25T10:56:53Z","timestamp":1551092213000},"page":"471","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":42,"title":["Photon-Counting Lidar: An Adaptive Signal Detection Method for Different Land Cover Types in Coastal Areas"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"11","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-1241-8650","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yue","family":"Ma","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"},{"name":"School of Science, University of New South Wales, Canberra, BC 2610, Australia"},{"name":"Sino Australian Research Centre for Coastal Management, University of New South Wales, Canberra, BC 2610, Australia"}]},{"given":"Wenhao","family":"Zhang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"}]},{"given":"Jinyan","family":"Sun","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Water Conservancy and Water Resources, Anhui &amp; Huaihe River Institute of Hydraulic Research, Hefei 230088, China"}]},{"given":"Guoyuan","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Satellite Surveying and Mapping Application Center of NASMG, Beijing 100830, China"}]},{"given":"Xiao Hua","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Science, University of New South Wales, Canberra, BC 2610, Australia"},{"name":"Sino Australian Research Centre for Coastal Management, University of New South Wales, Canberra, BC 2610, Australia"}]},{"given":"Song","family":"Li","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China"}]},{"given":"Nan","family":"Xu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling, Department of Earth System Science, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2019,2,25]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"3725","DOI":"10.1364\/AO.41.003725","article-title":"Cloud physics lidar: Instrument description and initial measurement results","volume":"41","author":"McGill","year":"2002","journal-title":"Appl. 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