- Jason Stoker, CLICK Director is the author of an important research paper on LiDAR band combinations.
- By combining LiDAR derived data, such as slope, with the primary color bands more “imagery friendly” data products can be produced.
- This opens up the use of well established image processing and classification techniques.
Jason Stoker, who is the Director of USGS’s CLICK – Center for LiDAR Information Coordination and Knowledge is the author of an important research paper that has just been published in the March 2010 PE&RS Journal. As this is not a peer reviewed article it is open to the public.
Jason and his team are conducting research on the use of lidar-derived data, such as elevation or slope, to create more visually informative, and “imagery friendly” data formats. If you are used to working with multi- or hyperspectral imagery than the approach will be familiar to you. If not, it will take some time to understand how the data can be combined with the 3 primary colors RGB – red, green and blue to produce what Jason refers to as LiDAR band combinations.
In the end the potential benefits of this approach include the ability to take advantage of well established image processing and classification methods for analyzing the data, as well as the general improvement derived from better visual understanding of the information.
Jason is requesting that people experiment with this approach and provide him with your feedback.
This was a great article. I wish I could blow up some of those images as posters for our geospatial teaching lab. Just when this article was released we were presenting some of our thoughts on LiDAR/imagery fusion at the NYC Million Trees Research Symposium. While fusion of the two data types works well in most areas, in the case of mapping trees in urban canyons we found that the best results are achieved when imagery is used to help inform the extraction of tree canopy from LiDAR. This allows us to detect trees even in rather extreme shadows. Different rules are used to extract tree canopy in these shadow areas, emphasizing the LiDAR attributes over the spectral information in the imagery. The complete post is here -http://letters-sal.blogspot.com/2010/03/seeing-trees-through-city.html