This article presents early results of the FUDOTERAM project using bathymetric LiDAR data acquired with the SHOALS-3000, the latest bathymetric LiDAR system from Optech. The survey area is in the coastal zone along the northern shore of Chaleurs Bay, in the western Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada. The project aimed to apply the SHOALS-3000 to geological mapping, sedimentary process monitoring and marine habitat mapping. This paper focuses on the sedimentological part of the study and presents the early raw data obtained to produce a bottom type classification based on some simple parameters, roughness, slope angle and direction. Two methods are evaluated for analysis of the SHOALS-3000 waveforms, the Moment Method and the Gaussian Mixture Model, and the latter is used as an approach to model the bottom type signal.
The Scanning Hydrographic Operational Airborne LiDAR Survey (SHOALS) consists of a bathymetric LiDAR system which provides high precision measurements of water depth. Even though 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 sea-bed. This paper highlights the benthic characterization in extracting statistical parameters derived from the bottom backscatter. In applying multivariate analysis (K-means), it is significantly proven that signals derived from habitat, described as statistically homogeneous throughout ground-truth analysis, are (1) similar within an intra-habitat view, while they are (2) different between themselves.
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