The vertical structure classification of forest plays an important role in ecology and forestry. A vertical canopy profile (pseudo-wave) was obtained by fitting the frequency distribution of height and coverage of discrete laser point cloud in Guangxi by using the tenth order polynomial method,which reflected the vertical distribution of canopy material. Canopy structure parameters such as effective peak,stand surface height,sub-storey height,and crown ratio were extracted by pseudo-wave and classification rules were established to divide the vertical structure of stands into six types.Confusion matrix was used to evaluate the classification accuracy,and an area of 1369km² was selected for mapping to test the generalization of classification rules. The results showed that: 1) In the classification results of 1 147 sample plots,the overall classification accuracy was 93.9%,and the Kappa coefficient was 0.913;2) The error rates of single-peak,double-peak and triple-peak were 6.2%,7.4% and 9.1% respectively,while the error rates of Chinese fir forest,pine forest,eucalyptus forest and broadleaved forest were 9%,6.4%,2.4% and 6.9%,respectively,indicating that the more complex the vertical structure of the stand,the lower the accuracy of classification;3) The accuracy of each forest layer was higher than 96%,the omission errors were less than 4%,and the commission errors were less than 10%,indicating that each forest layer can be accurately detected;4) The coverage of classification rules in mapping areas reached 99.8%. In this study,vertical forest classification method with high accuracy,good generalization and rich spatial information is suitable for overstory vertical structure classification mapping of large regional subtropical forest.