True-Color Three-Dimensional Imaging and Target Classification BASED on Hyperspectral LiDAR

True-color three-dimensional (3D) imaging exploits spatial and spectral information and can enable accurate feature extraction and object classification. The existing methods, however, are limited by data collection mechanisms when realizing true-color 3D imaging. We overcome this problem and present a novel true-color 3D imaging method based on a 32-channel hyperspectral LiDAR (HSL) covering a 431–751 nm spectral range. We conducted two experiments, one with nine-color card papers and the other with seven different colored objects. We used the former to investigate the effect of true-color 3D imaging and determine the optimal spectral bands for compositing true-color, and the latter to explore the classification potential based on the true-color feature using polynomial support vector machine (SVM) and Gaussian naive Bayes (NB) classifiers. Since using all bands of HSL will cause color distortions, the optimal spectral band combination for better compositing the true-color were selected by principal component analysis (PCA) and spectral correlation measure (SCM); PCA emphasizes the amount of information in band combinations, while SCM focuses on correlation between bands. The results show that the true-color 3D imaging can be realized based on HSL measurements, and three spectral bands of 466, 546, and 626 nm were determined. Comparing reflectance of the three selected bands, the overall classification accuracy of seven different colored objects was improved by 14.6% and 8.25% based on SVM and NB, respectively, classifiers after converting spectral intensities into true-color information. Overall, this study demonstrated the potential of HSL system in retrieving true-color and facilitating target recognition, and can serve as a guide in developing future three-channel or multi-channel true-color LiDAR