- The lack of standards is holding back the laser scanning industry.
- Developing the standard tests is not as easy as calibrating a 100′ steel tape, but it needs to be done.
- The ASTM E57 3D Imaging committee is working on developing standards, but more support is needed.
Yesterday’s post made a brief reference to accuracy standards. That caused me to think more about the overall need for standards in the laser scanning industry. In addition to the fact that the software component of a completely integrated 3D workflow solution is constraining the use of laser scanned data, the lack of industry standards by which consumers can judge and compare the hardware is also a key limiting factor.
Going waaaaay back I can remember when you could send your 100′ steel tape into NIST (I think), and they would issue you a calibration report. The same applied to aerial camera systems. As the electronic/digital survey devices each came on the scene in the 80′s the consumer could compare manufacturer’s specifications to determine which instrument they needed to achieve the desired level of accuracy.
Unfortunately coming up with the standard accuracy tests by which laser scanners can be compared is not that simple, but that does not mean that we should not try. The same applies to data exchange formats. The success that LAS has had is testament to the value of such an effort.
As the Chairman of the Data Interoperability subcommittee of the ASTM International’s E57 3D Imaging Systems committee I can report that work is in progress to develop industry standards in 4 areas – terminology, test methods, best practices and data interoperability. These are completely volunteer efforts, which are receiving support from a number of the key players, but we can certainly use additional support for this effort.
I like to use the music industry as an example of the benefits of standards. From vinyl records to tape, from CD’s to DVD’s the music industry always knew that they had to support a common delivery standard. They realized from the start that in the end it was the content that consumers wanted, not the technology.
The laser scanning industry – both the providers and the consumers need to demand that standards be developed, sooner rather than later. This will be a key driver of increasing the acceptance of the technology, and to increased benefits for all interested parties.
As someone who’s worked extensively with the LAS specification implementing libLAS, here are a few of my thoughts. We have done our best to implement all three versions of the LAS specification to the letter. The act of doing so has shown us that some of the vendors who’ve implemented the LAS spec have not done so well at implementing to the letter. There can be many reasons for this, but I think one reason is the only way to test whether or not your implementation works is to try it with other commercial softwares. This is solution is less than ideal.
Well-written standards are not complete until they have practical implementations. Besides the written specification, I think it is very important to have an open reference implementation. Additionally, an open source reference implementation has the advantage of all vendors in the ecosystem having the ability to use it in their software if they wish. A reference implementation can be used to validate files and stamp a vendor with approval if the standards committee were to ever start doing so.
OGC and other standards organization use reference implementations to help ensure even and consistent adoption of their standards. While I think the LAS specification is well-adopted, I think there are still some cases where it is variably-implemented. A reference implementation has the advantage of being an arbiter in such cases where practicality might have to trump specification purity.
I would love to see libLAS (or any other open source competitor) be made the reference implementation for the ASPRS LAS specification, because saying your software writes LAS files and testing whether or not are two very different things.
Thanks for the insight Howard. I will pass on to my subcommittee. We are planning a reference implementation for the reader and writer, so this will be very helpful.