Abstract
INTRODUCTION: Three-dimensional spectral distributions of forest stands can provide spatial information on the physiological and biochemical status of forests, which is vital for forest management. However, three-dimensional spectral studies of forest stands are limited. METHODS: In this study, LiDAR and multispectral data were collected from Masson pine stands in southern Fujian Province, China, and a method was proposed for inverting forest spectra using point clouds as a unit. First, multispectral values were mapped to a point cloud, and the isolated forest algorithm combined with K-means clustering was applied to characterize fusion data. Second, five deep learning algorithms were selected for semantic segmentation, and the overall accuracy (oAcc) and mean intersection ratio (mIoU) were used to evaluate the performance of various algorithms on the fusion data set. Third, the semantic segmentation model was used to reconfigure the class 3D spectral distribution, and the model inversion outcomes were evaluated by the peaks and valleys of the curve of the predicted values and distribution gaps. RESULTS: The results show that the correlations between spectral attributes and between spatial attributes were both greater than 0.98, while the correlation between spectral and spatial attributes was 0.43. The most applicable method was PointMLP, highest oAcc was 0.84, highest mIoU was 0.75, peak interval of the prediction curve tended to be consistent with the true values, and maximum difference between the predicted value and the true value of the point cloud spectrum was 0.83. DISCUSSION: Experimental data suggested that combining spatial fusion and semantic segmentation effectively inverts three-dimensional spectral information for forest stands. The model could meet the accuracy requirements of local spectral inversion, and the NIR values of stands in different regions were correlated with the vertical height of the canopy and the distance from the tree apex in the region. These findings improve our understanding of the precise three-dimensional spectral distribution of forests, providing a basis for near-earth remote sensing of forests and the estimation of forest stand health.