For multispectral analysis of forest land in mountainous areas, the estimation of true reflectance without the terrain having an effect on the sensor response is indispensable. To study this subject, the authors carried out the following experiment. First, we made a precise digital terrain model (DTM) at an interval of 10 m for a test forest site covered with Lambertian-type crown surface. Analysing the forest land from the SPOT data with the precise DTM, we obtained a classification result of forest type about 20 per cent higher accuracy than the result without application of this method.