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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9050</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-101-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Improved reflectance calculation in full-waveform LiDAR considering the angle of incidence</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Rhomberg-Kauert</surname>
<given-names>Jan</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Pöppl</surname>
<given-names>Florian</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Laasch</surname>
<given-names>Helena</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0001-0663-8465</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Pfennigbauer</surname>
<given-names>Martin</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Mandlburger</surname>
<given-names>Gottfried</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2332-293X</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation, TU Wien, 1040 Vienna, Austria</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>RIEGL Laser Measurement Systems GmbH, 3580 Horn, Austria</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry, ETH Zurich, 8093 Zurich, Switzerland</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>RIEGL Research and Defense GmbH, 3580 Horn, Austria</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>03</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XI-1-2026</volume>
<fpage>101</fpage>
<lpage>110</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Jan Rhomberg-Kauert et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/101/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-101-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/101/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-101-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/101/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-101-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/101/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-101-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Reflectance is a widely used feature for all types laser scanning data. Thus, the accuracy and improvement of the reflectance parameter is a persistent topic of research. For short laser pulses with medium-sized footprints, previous work has investigated the effects of inclined targets on the recorded waveform of full-waveform LiDAR systems. In this work, a new methods to extract incidence angle from only a single waveform can be leveraged to improve reflectance values through recalculation based on the laser-radar equation and correcting for angle of incidence artifacts. The results of the proposed method are evaluated with two datasets based on two different topo-bathymtric laser scanners. For both systems, we calculated the relative biconical reflectance and relative averaged bidirectional reflectance distribution function (rBRDF) and evaluated them on homogeneous roof faces. The two reflectance measures are then compared to the initial reflectance values of the laser scanners used in the study. Both measures showed improvements compared to the standard values. The biconical reflectance shows the best overall mean score for all surveyed roofs with an median absolute devation improvement of 0.80 dB to 0.62 dB for the &lt;em&gt;RIEGL&lt;/em&gt; VQ-880-GII and 0.61 dB to 0.56 dB for the &lt;em&gt;RIEGL&lt;/em&gt; VQ-1560i-DW. In addition the rBRDF also displays an improvement with varying results depending on the deployed system. These results highlight the advantages of the proposed reflectance measures and the potential improvement of the widely used LiDAR attribute.</p>
</abstract>
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