This interview with Reuma Arav is the fourth in the Lidar News Young Geospatial Spotlight Interview series. Congratulations to Reuma for a great start on her career. Please be sure to think about sharing your story and/or recommending us to a colleague.
(Editor’s Note – Be sure to check out the new Younger Geospatial Professionals LinkedIn Group. To join click here.)
Reuma Arav
I am a registered surveyor and a Ph.D. candidate in the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. In my research, I develop new autonomous ways to detect and characterize subtle features within laser scans, regardless of the scanned environment – be it built or natural.
I came across the geomatics profession completely by mistake. After registering to study Material Engineering, I received a leaflet inviting me to study Mapping and Geo-Information Engineering.
Over the past 5+ years Hexagon has acquired a number of firms that are in the data procurement and mapping services business. This business unit is now being promoted as the HxGN Content Program.
HxGN Content Program
The HxGN Content Program, a premier source for professional airborne imagery provided through the cloud, was created to satisfy the demand for current, accurate data for professionals. With an ongoing trend from a purchased-and-owned service to a faster streaming service, the Hexagon Content Program, is taking the geospatial industry to the online cloud.
Here are six things that you should know about one of the most accurate imagery programs in the world:
The HxGN Content Program provides off-the-shelf, high-resolution, quality controlled and regularly updated orthophotos and is currently available in North America and parts of Europe.
The program uses industry-leading Leica Geosystems capture technology, such as Leica ADS100 and Leica DMC III airborne sensors, for collection and Leica XPro and Leica HxMap for post-processing.
The ortho rectified imagery is available at 30-centimetre resolution in Wide Area Coverage (WAC) and Urban Area Coverage (UAC) at 15-centimeter resolution.
The program will update its airborne imagery for more than 4.5 million km² in North America and add approximately 900,000 km² in Europe (bringing Western European coverage to more than 2.6 million km²) by the end of 2018.
The content is collected by partners that help to extensively grow the coverage and provide data before extraction and classification for a variety of applications.
The HxGN Content Program is offering elevation data. Currently in testing, the elevation program will provide high-density calibrated point clouds collected with single photon LiDAR technology at an average point density of 8 points per square meter and will cover the entire United States.
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It certainly sounds more complicated than Time of Flight (ToF), but Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) lidar has a number of important advantages over ToF, like being able to measure the velocity of objects in a scene and having the sensor not be affected by bright light sources such as the Sun.
Aeva FMCW Lidar
Two veterans of the yet-to-be-taken-public, Apple driverless car project have left the mother-ship and gone off on their own to form Aeva. They are pushing FMCW (more on that below) as the differentiator among the myriad of autonomous vehicle start-ups jockeying for position in over-hyped, VC-driven Silicon Valley.
This market is in a classic bubble. How does one know a bubble when you see one? It’s simple. When your reason for buying something at an inflated price is that it will be worth more tomorrow, then my friend you are in a bubble.
Hack Partners with their Hacktrain platform, not to be confused with Hackatrain is a group of innovators that believe that through collaboration they can achieve anything. They have already achieved impressive results in the rail industry, now they are turning their attention to infrastructure.
Hack Partners Presents InfraHack
Hack Partners creates industry hackathons, innovative technology, data analytics and provides strategic advise. Hacktrain 5.0, powered by Hack Partners is a platform for driving innovation in the rail industry.They are based in the UK.
Keith Bentley, CTO of Bentley Systems mentioned last week that the two groups would be working together to stage Infrahack, an important hackathon, based in part on the iModel.js open source project that Lidar News recently covered.
This blog post is on a lighter note, as you have probably already guessed. We have had our share of physics lately, but I still think you will learn some things, or at least be able to pass the video on to someone who needs a basic introduction to the concept of lidar.
Aerial Lidar in Action
Let’s start at the beginning with the term lidar, or however you prefer to spell it – not going there. I have always thought that lidar is an acronym (not an abbreviation) for light detecting and ranging. It is just like radar, but instead of radio waves it uses light waves to do the ranging.
According to the energetic presenter in the following video, the term lidar is actually a portmanteau that was first used in the 1960’s. Wikipedia provides this reference.
Lidar News (LN) has had a busy month, so much so that we are a few weeks late on voting for the Video of the Month for September 2018. We don’t want our contestants to feel left out, so let’s get on with it.
September 2018 LN Video of the Month
LN needs your help to select the outstanding video for September 2018 from the following list:
In order to simplify the corporate messaging the Certainty 3D company name is being replaced with TopoDOT – the name of their flagship software. The new TopoDOT will still have the same leadership, support team and the same office – just different email contact information. If you have any questions and/or requests please send them to support@topodot.com.
The TopoDOT Team
Why is this group so happy. Well in addition to a new company name they have had a tremendously successful year, but they are not resting on their accomplishments. In fact, they are just getting started.
Erika K. Carlson has recently had her article entitled, “20 Things You Didn’t Know About … Lasers” published in Discover Magazine. Here are a few of the more interesting items.
The Ruby Laser
As we have noted recently the Nobel prize in Physics the past two years has involved lasers. And for many years readers of this blog we have been tracking the use of lidar to uncover lost civilizations around the world, but I bet you didn’t know that a grad student of one of the “inventors” of the laser, Gordon Gould claimed that he designed one before the Nobel prize laureates. As proof of his claim he was awarded the patent rights in 1977, nearly 20 years after the original discovery. Continue reading →
This interview with Rhonda Dodge is the third Lidar News Young Geospatial Spotlight Interview. Congratulations to Rhonda for what she has accomplished in a short time and please think about sharing your story.
Rhonda, can you please provide a recap of your post high school education and training. Do you have any licenses or certifications? Are you a member of any organizations?
Out of high school I went to the Oregon Institute of Technology for four years (2012-2016) and earned my B.S. in Geomatics-Surveying Option and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics.
Dr. Kim Calders and his team have just completed 2 months of field work in Australian tropical forests collecting both terrestrial and UAS lidar data to support a novel lidar data fusion methodology.
Example of Tree Segmentation
Forest ecosystems contain more biomass than any other ecosystem. However, estimating biomass without cutting down trees is difficult. Traditional methods of estimating aboveground biomass (ABG) are based on correlations between destructive estimates of volume and diameter and/or height, which can be measured more easily in the field.
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