LAI estimation based on physical model combining airborne LiDAR waveform and Sentinel-2 imagery

Leaf area index (LAI) is an important biophysical parameter of vegetation and serves as a significant indicator for assessing forest ecosystems. Multi-source remote sensing data enables large-scale and dynamic surface observations, providing effective data for quantifying various indices in forest and evaluating ecosystem changes. However, employing single-source remote sensing spectral or LiDAR waveform data poses limitations for LAI inversion, making the integration of multi-source remote sensing data a trend. Currently, the fusion of active and passive remote sensing data for LAI inversion primarily relies on empirical models, which are mainly constructed based on field measurements and do not provide a good explanation of the fusion mechanism. In this study, we aimed to estimate LAI based on physical model using both spectral imagery and LiDAR waveform, exploring whether data fusion improved the accuracy of LAI inversion. Specifically, based on the physical model geometric-optical and radiative transfer (GORT), a fusion strategy was designed for LAI inversion. To ensure inversion accuracy, we enhanced the data processing by introducing a constraint-based EM waveform decomposition method. Considering the spatial heterogeneity of canopy/ground reflectivity ratio in regional forests, calculation strategy was proposed to improve this parameter in inversion model. The results showed that the constraint-based EM waveform decomposition method improved the decomposition accuracy with an average 12% reduction in RMSE, yielding more accurate waveform energy parameters. The proposed calculation strategy for the canopy/ground reflectivity ratio, considering dynamic variation of parameter, effectively enhanced previous research that relied on a fixed value, thereby improving the inversion accuracy that increasing on the correlation by 5% to 10% and on R(2) by 62.5% to 132.1%. Based on the inversion strategy we proposed, data fusion could effectively be used for LAI inversion. The inversion accuracy achieved using both spectral and LiDAR data (correlation=0.81, R(2 = )0.65, RMSE=1.01) surpassed that of using spectral data or LiDAR alone. This study provides a new inversion strategy for large-scale and high-precision LAI inversion, supporting the field of LAI research.