The presence of ridges in the DTM in Fig. 7(c) and the extreme values in the difference model in Fig. 8 should also be noted. The ridges are due to a lack of overlaps between the patches, which makes DTM interpolation unstable at the borders of the patches. However, due to the way the LiDAR data is normalized using the DTM, the ridges do not make a direct contribution to the error in tree-height estimates computed using the DTM. In normalizing the data, the elevation of each point is subtracted from the elevation of the nearest point on the DTM surface with distance measured in the x–y plane (see Fig. 9). Thus, the error is constrained within individual DTM patches. A possible solution to this problem is to incorporate overlaps in DTM interpolation. On the other hand, the extreme values in Fig. 8 are due to the presence of humps in both Fig. 7(c) and (d). The humps occur at places where there are extremely few ground points caused by closed canopy which leads which makes the algorithms classify points from tree branches as ground points.