3D Modeling AI Autonomous vehicles Laser Scanning Lidar Technology

Making Lidar Based Spatial Intelligence Plug and Play

image of Box Making Lidar Plug & Play for App Developers
Making Lidar Plug & Play for App Developers

Outsight was founded in 2019 by 4 serial tech entrepreneurs with deep industry knowledge and experience in autonomous vehicles, robotics and embedded AI. With offices in San Francisco, Paris and Helsinki, Outsight’s vision is to make lidar based spatial intelligence plug and play, thereby opening it up to application developers in any market. To explain their strategy they have developed an in-depth white paper entitled, “Using Lidar in Real-time Applications.” A link to download the white paper is provided at the end of this blog.

The white paper opens by posing the question, “If lidar is such an attractive technology, why aren’t we seeing it used more often? To answer that important question the paper explores the main challenges that technology integrators face when using lidar in real-time, and the pros and cons of the different approaches to solve them.

The key challenge being addressed by Outsight is the use of lidar in real time applications such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, crowd flow monitoring and security. There is a great deal of experience with collecting 3D laser scans that will be post processed at a later time using either static or dynamic platforms. The much larger opportunity is to use lidar in real time apps where they can become essential components of consumer products such as the recently shipping iPhone 13 Pro. Lidar News has predicted that lidar will become more widely used than GPS by the end of this decade. We are just beginning.

The white paper explains that it is not cost or performance that is holding the use of lidar back, it is the complexity of working with the data, particularly for real time applications. 3D data is complex to interpret and use because it is sparse and fundamentally different from 2D RGB images that computer vision specialists are currently working with. Add movement of the sensor platform and the task becomes even more challenging. The end result of all of this is it becomes very expensive to develop lidar-based real time applications.

What’s the solution? You can hire a team of experts to build an in-house full stack software to integrate lidar, but that is high risk in many ways. You could also partner with a software engineering services provider, but in most cases you want to develop and own the code.

Enter Outsight with what they are calling a 3D Pre-Processor named the Augmented Lidar Box. Running in real time lidar pre-processing software takes raw 3D data as an input and instantly converts it to accessible, actionable insight. Simply put. it helps lidar sensors localize, track, and classify objects making it easy for app developers to focus on building their custom consumer solutions. The Box is simply inserted into the workflow between the lidar sensor and the application software – nothing else changes. The Outsight software is delivered as a convenient plug & play edge device.

There is no question there will be issues with data formats which ASTM e57 can help to address, but Outsight has developed what should be a game changing technology for the consumer app industry.

For the complete white paper CLICK HERE.

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