Fusion of high spatial resolution WorldView-2 imagery and LiDAR pseudo-waveform for object-based image analysis

The fused dataset achieved an overall classification accuracy of 97.58%, a kappa coefficient of 0.97, and producer's accuracies and user's accuracies all larger than 90%. The use of the fused dataset improved the overall accuracy by 7.61% over the use of HSR imagery alone, and McNemar's test indicated that such improvement was statistically significant (p < 0.001). This study demonstrates the great potential of pseudo-waveform in improving object-based image analysis. This is especially true since currently the majority of commercial LiDAR data are of discrete return while waveform data are still not widely available.