- The NEURISA workshop was a great example of the value of local education.
- Their are still many organizational challenges to the acceptance of 3D and laser scanning.
- With care automated feature extraction and a significant reduction in the need for breaklines is achievable.
Yesterday’s session was well worth the time and a great example of the end user education and engagement that is essential to the growth of our industry. There were about 25 attendees. Thanks to the ESRI Boston office for hosting the event.
The first presenter was Michael Clifford from Digital Geographic Technologies, Inc. – DGT. Mike pointed out the challenges of integrating laser scanning and 3D technologies into the traditional land surveying firm, and customer base. They are still using a Cyrax 2500 along with a Riegl (did not get the model) on a variety of projects including construction monitoring, forensic investigations and structural investigations.
Mike’s biggest frustration is with customers not being able to actually make use of the rich 3D point cloud data that he can provide. This has organizational change roots as well as the fact that as he noted that AutoCAD and Microstation cannot easily support point clouds. He is often forced to provide 2D CAD drawings. On a couple of projects he was able to clearly show the value of working in 3D, and of laser scanning. Unless the project requires 3D analysis it is still a real challenge in the traditional land surveying world to demonstrate the value of laser scanning.
Pierre-Paul Grondin from Trimble Geo-3D delivered a very clear and detailed second presentation on mobile mapping. Pierre indicated that Geo-3D, based in Brossard, Quebec was purchased by Trimble mainly for their time synchronization technology – their time stamping. This of course is at the heart of getting the required accuracy in mobile mapping. Interestingly, when I asked Pierre if he thought it was possible to achieve engineering grade with today’s systems he said no. I have heard a number of opinions on this, so buyer beware.
Pierre also indicated that they were having great success with narrowly defined feature extraction projects, such as road signs. In a 24 mile project they had only 16 false hits, most of which were mailboxes, and missed only 1. The key was knowing where to look and the characteristics of what you were looking for. He also indicated that customers were most interested in their video logging deliverable as this was something that everyone could relate to and understand.
We were very lucky to have Qassim Abdullah, Chief Scientist at Fugro Geospatial Services provide the aerial LiDAR presentation. The animation in his slides made the physics much easier to understand, even for beginners, who gained an appreciation for the challenges associated with penetrating tree canopy and the value of using LiDAR to obtain elevation data versus orthophotography.
I found the most interesting information to be from the research they have been doing with regards to the need for breaklines. As you might guess, this is one of the most expensive input variables to a LiDAR mapping project as it is a manual step. Fugro has found that by using slope as an indicator of where breaklines are needed that they can achieve the required accuracy with far less breakline creation than they used to do.
Many thanks to the speakers and NEURISA for a great educational session.
