Surface reflectance retrieval from the intensity data of a terrestrial laser scanner

The intensity data recorded by terrestrial laser scanning systems are considered significant measures of the spectral property of scanned objects. These data can be used in an extensive range of object-based applications. However, the direct retrieval of reflectance from intensity information is infeasible because intensity data are influenced by multiple variables, particularly distance and incidence angle. This study proposes a new method to recover the absolute reflectance value of the scanned surface by eliminating the effects of distance and incidence angle. The Faro Focus^3D 120 terrestrial scanner is utilized in the case study. Two sets of experiments are designed to estimate the parameters of the developed model by using Lambertian targets at different reflectance values. With the estimated parameters, the proposed method is applied to recover the reflectance values of natural surfaces. The deviation of the retrieved reflectance values of natural surfaces from the reflectance values measured by a spectrometer is approximately 2.64%. Results show that the proposed method exhibits high accuracy in retrieving reflectance values and can be utilized for actual mapping tasks and geological applications.