Airborne lidar for fisheries applications

An airborne lidar using commercial, off-the-shelf components was developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for fisheries' surve ys. We make several test flights of the system and develop several signal p rocessing techniques to discriminate between the returns from fish and from small particles in the water. We use these techniques to produce several p roducts of use to fisheries' biologists. Examples are presented of gray-sca le images similar to those produced by acoustic echo sounders, of maps of s patial distributions of fish, and of vertical profiles of fish biomass. (C) 2001 Society of Photo-Optical instrumentation Engineers.