We’ve packed this edition, our annual Airborne Technology Showcase, with five feature articles that illustrate lidar’s growing capabilities—perhaps more importantly, how it has become the tool of choice to address a cornucopia of projects all over the world.
We lead with a piece by Nelson Mattie and Alfonso Gomez on the use of lidar to mitigate the threats to Ecuador’s dry tropical forests. The sensor was a RIEGL LMS-Q680i and the software was from rapidlasso (LAStools) and BayesMap Solutions. The results were biomass and carbon stock estimations, so critical now as we finally address the results of climate change. There’s a valuable section of the article where the authors summarize the advantages of full-waveform data capture and analysis.
On page 16, we have a submission from Contributing Writer Al Karlin and George Cole, centered on a fascinating bathymetric lidar project. Eight miles off the coast of Florida lies the Ochlockonee Shoal, ever since the Spanish sailed through the area in the 1630s to supply a mission. The Coast & Geodetic Survey conducted a hydrographic survey in 1881 and that appeared to be the most up-to-date until NV5 and Dewberry flew bathymetric lidar in 2021 and 2022, using RIEGL VQ-880-G II and Teledyne Optech CZMIL SuperNova sensors respectively. The comparisons between these two recent surveys are interesting and informative, whereas the similarities with the 1881 data are more elusive.
I am particularly excited about our third feature which begins on page 26. It’s a tutorial rather than an article about a specific project or technology and thus is slanted towards readers new to lidar and those readers working in the field who feel the need for some review. The author is Gottfried Mandlburger, one of the best known lidar teachers and researchers in the modern world. I know Gottfried well. He’s now a full professor at the Technical University of Vienna, but I met him when he was spending three years researching at the University of Stuttgart. I’ve since met him at conferences in several countries and, after much persuasion, he agreed to provide a four-part tutorial on modern airborne lidar. We are very grateful to Gottfried for the considerable work required to create these lessons.
Our fourth feature is from Al Karlin again, this time accompanied by Andrew Peters, both of them with Dewberry. Beginning on page 32, they describe a 20 ppsm lidar survey of the State of Connecticut, flown for the Connecticut State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO). Among the deliverables were LoD2 building models and the key point is that those buildings found from the lidar data to have chimneys in their centers were designated to be historic structures.
Not so long ago, there was tremendous debate in the airborne lidar world about linear-mode versus Geiger-mode versus single-photon. Such excitement is characteristic of the geospatial world—I remember animated discussions about opaque versus luminous measuring marks in analytical stereoplotters—and perhaps reflects the Gartner Hype Cycle, but then life goes on. But the subjects of these flurries of conversation remain. On page 36 we present 3DEO, a spin-out from MIT Lincoln Laboratory that makes Geiger-mode lidar systems, both the sensor hardware and the software that optimizes the results. These configurations doubtless had their origins in military systems, but they are operational, and I predict we will hear more from 3DEO. The article is informative, but also educational, because Drs. Kim Reichel-Vischi and Dale Fried explain Geiger-mode principles in an accessible way. There are explanations also in Gottfried Mandlburger’s tutorial, so readers have the fruits of three expert’s distillations, all in a few pages!
Looking back at 2024
The richness of the end-of-year fare, then, amply underscores the prevalence and persistence of lidar. This is a good time, therefore, to reflect on lidar events in 2024 that I had the privilege to attend. Geo Week 2024 in Denver, marked the last Lidar Leader Awards and the first World Lidar Day (12 February).
The big commercial events, of course, impress with their sheer size and bustle. The Esri International User Conference in San Diego and the INTERGEO conference and trade show in Stuttgart attract just over and just under 20,000 attendees each. There was plenty of lidar content too. INTERGEO is always frustrating: there are three halls with more than 600 exhibitors, so it is impossible to carry out any sort of comprehensive assessment, nor find time for the conference element. Even so, LIDAR Magazine had many supberb encounters this year, for example with Trimble (Trimble Applanix president Dr. Steve Woolven is an upcoming podcast guest) and Phase One.
On the Hexagon booth, we learned that more than 700 units of the camera module used in the Leica Geosystems airborne sensors, all of which are modular, have now been fielded. We saw a new hybrid sensor, the usual formula of multiple 150 mp cameras and lidar, with which we are familiar from the CityMapper series, but this time there was great excitement since the new formula is—to be less than scientific—a Leica DMC-4 plus the single-photon lidar sensor from the SPL100. It also transpires that no less than eight SPL100s are in use, collecting data for end-users and for the Hexagon Content Program. This can acquire unbelievable volumes of data.
On the RIEGL booth, we were honored to be conducted through the new products by Dr. Andreas Ullrich—affable, brilliant lidar guru and RIEGL’s CTO. The high-end lidar sensor for crewed aircraft appears in its third iteration, the VQ-1560 III-S, which features the integrated data recorder previously seen on the VQ-1460 and a 10% increase in speed from the VQ-1560 II, as well as multiple incremental improvements. The high-end TLS, the long-range VZ-4000i-25, also offers new features. Andreas ended the tour by giving us a potted history of the VUX-1×0 series, from the 120, introduced in 2020, through the 160 (2021), the 180 (2023), to the new VUX-100-25, with a large field of view of 160 degrees and a high pulse repetition rate of up to 1500 kHz.
We enjoyed a memorable visit to the NavVis booth for the launch of the new, handheld MLX sensor, which is smaller, more nimble and less expensive than the shoulder-carried VLX2 and VLX3. The well-orchestrated introduction was led by CEO Dr. Felix Reinshagen, who has subsequently been my guest on The LIDAR Magazine Podcasts. Nearby, French UAV-lidar integrator YellowScan was very visible. Their bathymetric Navigator system is going out into the market and the company has successfully adapted to being a manufacturer as well as an integrator. YellowScan’s superb user meeting, held near Montpellier, is being repeated biennially, but the company is branching out and is planning regional events around the globe.
Although INTERGEO will run in a similar way for the next three years (in Frankfurt in 2025 and 2027, Munich in 2026), change is afoot. The owner of the event is DVW e.V., the German Association for Geodesy, Geoinformation and Land Management. DVW has chosen Mesago Messe Frankfurt, to take over from the event’s current partner, Hinte Expo & Conference GmbH. DVW and Hinte will be continuing their successful working relationship up to and including INTERGEO 20271. From 2028, therefore, we will see changes to the event, as well as a lot more of Frankfurt.
1 messefrankfurt.com/frankfurt/en/press/press-releases/2024/intergeo.html