Abstract The light detection and ranging (LIDAR) full-waveform echo decomposition method based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and the local-Levenberg–Marquard (LM) algorithm is proposed in this paper. The proposed method can decompose the full-waveform echo into a series of components, each of which can be assumed as essentially Gaussian. The original full-waveform echo is decomposed into the intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and a final residual by using the EMD first.
