Category Archives: Lidar/Imaging
Not Everything Requires High Accuracies
How feature inspection, assessment, and reporting are now available to non-experts (and experts alike). In the early 2000s, Leon Toorenburg was in Africa mapping the locations of communications and utility towers. He was carrying a laser range finder, a camera, a GPS receiver, a laptop, and a field stick. It occurred to him that there...
Using Ortho Imagery (Digital Aerial) in ArcGIS Pro
The new version of Esri’s ArcGIS Pro software offers the capability to use stereo imagery, something of great use to those looking to digitize and use 3D vector data. To this end, I thought I would try bringing in some stereo aerial data to see how the process works within ArcGIS Pro. Vague Knowledge At...
Recognition and Reasoning
How AI is going mainstream in the infrastructure industry. For years, humans have recognized images better than computers have. Our error rate has been steady at 5% while computer algorithms were at 30%. However, with the rise of computer vision and deep learning, the gap between humans and computers has slowly closed. Within the last...
The Future of Autonomous Transport
Geospatial technologies play a pivotal role for the Transport Systems Catapult, the UK’s not-for-profit innovation center for intelligent mobility. The town of Milton Keynes is at the heart of the UK’s transport revolution. It’s home to several tech start-ups and major transport-related brands, such as Network Rail (the UK’s rail authority), Leica Geosystems, Mercedes, VW,...
A Student SLAMs Stuttgart
As part of a bachelor’s thesis project, a university student successfully scanned more than 21,000 sq ft of complex office space in just 40 minutes with a mobile 3D laser scanner (the GeoSLAM ZEB-REVO), despite having never previously used the device. The point cloud created from the first-time scanning work was sufficient to generate an...
Slam an Entire Building
A Danish surveyor measured the floor area of 13-story building in 1.5 hours with a mobile 3D scanner. Accurately calculating the floor space area in a new building (either residential or office) has serious legal implications in Denmark, and this service has become important business for surveying companies there. One of these firms, LIFA Surveyors,...