A combination of aerial and terrestrial LIDAR are being used to monitor forests in the research work conducted by Monika Moskal, professor at the University of Washington and director of the Remote Sensing & Geospatial Analysis Laboratory. The detailed modeling of forests in the Pacific Northwest are being used for a variety of purposes, including the close study of the riparian forest/water interface and function for the suitability and sustainability of salmon habitat.

Moskal, spoke this week at the ILMF conference about the unique and well-suited contributions of LIDAR for forest study. She emphasized the repeatability of LIDAR measurements for ongoing observations that far exceeded the accuracy of field observation as well as the ability to observe large areas. The high-resolution forest modeling is proving superior for modeling Leaf Area Index or the roughness of the forest canopy as well as dbh for the size of tree trunks. Armed with this data, foresters can determine wood supply potential, forest fire potential, and better understand the forest/water intersection.

The ongoing study of the riparian areas extends beyond the suitability of habitat toward the ecosystem services of the forest for quality drinking water. Water is seen one of the leading potential marketplaces according to Ecosystem Marketplace, and in order to begin trading on the services that the forests provide for greater water quality, we will need to fine tune our means to model and monitor this valuable service.

The fusion of both LIDAR and hyperspectral imagery for the creation of realistic urban models for simulation purposes was the focus of a presentation this morning at ILMF by Raul Campos-Marquetti, senior hyperspectral scientist at Merrick & Company. The ultimate purpose of this model was a simulation for military training purposes by the U.S. Army’s RDECOM.

Hyperspectal provided the means to classify features and to create a spectral library of road surface types, roof types, vegetation classifications, and an understanding of different building types. The hyperspectral classifications were then used to do a pixel by pixel, point to point fusion to create an informed 3D model with real world features and land cover/land use classifications.

The “physical morphology” model informed the synthetic creation of building exteriors and interiors based on real observation of different material types. The resulting large-scale city model was more of a true modeled reality than what can be accomplished with simply point clouds, because the classifications informed more realistic simulation that could take into account the physics of the different material types.

Ken Hudnut of the U.S. Geological Survey discussed the use of LIDAR for both the Chilean and Haiti earthquakes at the ILMF event. Using the same scale, he showed the dramatic difference in size and shake pattern between these quakes. The Chilean fault size area was 60,000 sq km vs. 600 sq km in Haiti. He overlaid the PAGER product and combined with population centers, showing that the shaking patterns happened greatest in the densest areas in Haiti.

The Chilean earthquake was 500 times more energetic than in Haiti, although there were 300 times more deaths in Haiti, making it the sixth most lethal in recorded history. Given the level of deaths, the U.S. Geological Survey is studying Haiti in detail, with funding from USAID to understand what happened there, particularly since the global hazard map didn’t pinpoint the Haiti fault as a significant hazard area.

Construction, population density and strong shaking combined to make the Haiti quake the most fatal category 7 earthquake. The energy from the rupture of the Enriquillo fault largely went away from Port au Prince, making it less damaging than it could have been. The surface slip on the fault was mostly deep, without much surface faulting.

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has flow a system called ALIRT for LIDAR acquisition along the fault zone. The Rochester Institute of Technology/Kucera International flew a high-resolution collection project funded by the World Bank. LIDAR data has been shared via KMZ file through OpenTopography.org, and anyone can take a look.

The LIDAR and imagery combination provides a means to quantify land changes, and to assess in the field when different land changes occurred. Feature offsets give a sense of the slip rate along the fault over time. LIDAR is tremendously powerful for the assessment of offset features to understand where damage occurred in the past.

The USGS will be doing an overall hazard map of the area, and LIDAR has been very helpful to assess damage, understand coastal deformation issues, and has enabled the determination of the location of the fault in areas where it wouldn’t be detectable before.

Matt Bethel, the manager of systems engineering at Merrick and Company, provided a good overview of computer performance issues in the data-intensive LIDAR application space at the ILMF conference in Denver. Merrick has benchmarked a lot of different approaches in their need to increase throughput and decrease processing time for faster results. A good portion of investment is on the hardware/software side in a LIDAR shop, but time to process also factors in greatly to bottom-line costs in this process-centric industry.

Among the improvements and choices outlined by Bethel are:

• 64-bit platforms – hardware/OS/design software all as 64-bit means that more RAM is available, more stable, more data can be read in at once, less memory management needed
• Multi-core machines provide a processing time savings of 80% vs. single core and they prefer the Intel Nehalem processors, with a minimum of 8 processors as performance starts to plateau after 8
• 8GB or more of RAM is ideal
• GPU processing (general purpose graphic processing units) can assign processing tasks to the graphics cards (like NVIDIA’s CUDA) and GPUs are running a lot faster than CPUs — at 12x more speed currently. Pushing processing to GPUs increase speed anywhere from 1.5x to 100x faster. The industry will be able to handle the ever-increasing data density problem by utilizing GPU processors
• Hard drives also play a role with their speed (SAS or iSCSI connections vs. Fiber that can take a consultant to cofigure)
• Data processing from Network to Local to Network saves about 80% of time vs. using just network drive or reading/writing only local, with no build-up of data on the local drive to bog things down.
• 10Gbps ethernet network lines save roughly 40% of time as compared to 1Gbps cables
• Operating systems also impact time, with XP taking 70% more time than Windows 7

To wrap up the discussion, Bethel mentioned the move toward the cloud for processing, and he sees good promise in this approach although he hasn’t tested this approach and doesn’t know of good cloud solutions for LIDAR at this time.

Cost of entry into Mobile Mapping work is a considerable expense according to Lewis Graham of GeoCue from the ASPRS Hot Topics Session at ILMF 10 in Denver.

• $750 to 900K for the mapping system
• Vehicle $50K
• Production hardware $150K
• Production software $125K (can share some hardware and software if you already have airborne)

Personnel costs include the need for a driver, equipment operator and surveyor on the collection side. On the office side there’s a need for a production manager, geometric correction specialist, and at least two data collection technicians.

Mobile mapping has hit its commercial stride in 2009. As many as 10 different systems were sold last year even in a down economy.

Software is lagging now to exploit the data, but more software and solutions will emerge to speed up the data processing and visualizations of the final product.

The International LIDAR Mapping Forum kicks off today in Denver, with concurrent sessions on Data Acquisition and Coastal Zone and Bathymetric LIDAR. Tomorrow there are sessions on data fusion, current projects and technical developments. Friday includes a look at government initiatives, data processing and mobile mapping. There’s a good mix here of both practical application of the technology and talks focused on tackling technological hurdles.

Today includes several timely talks regarding the application of LIDAR for the response to the 2010 Haitian earthquake.

I look forward to delving into the details of these applications, and will file some reports later today from the show floor.

I love the idea of Obscura Day, a day of expeditions, back-room tours and hidden treasures in your own home town. The event planned for March 20, 2010 is organized by Atlas Obscura, a website that aims to compile the world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica. The event serves as both a promotion of the site and as a means to compile more locations into this Atlas of curious places as they’re actively recruiting new sites and cities.

There are worldwide events scheduled here that range from the behind-the-scenes museum wonders, to interesting tours of large machinery such as one of the largest pneumatic tube system at the Stanford University Hospital (4 miles of tubes), to a gold-plated home outside of Chicago, to the 3D Center of Art and Photography in Portland, Oregon. The site organizes participation in these events as many of them may fill up on this date. There’s no charge from the organizers, but some venues may have an admission price.

I scrolled through more than a dozen events and locations and found that I’d love to explore each of these places, and will be sure to check out the Atlas Obscura site prior to travels in new cities. I’ll be in Florida at the end of the month, and in a bit of the Everglades, so I may just have to check out the streets of Unit 11 in West Palm Beach that were laid out as a subdivision more than 40 years ago and that are now reclaimed by nature. Sounds like a movie set for an apocalyptic future that would be fascinating to see first hand. And judging from the rest of the list, these site are designed to offer an alternative take on what we know as reality.

Discovered via Twitter from a post by @reidab.

Videos from last week’s ESRI Federal User Conference are now online. Coverage includes an introduction and vision by Jack Dangermond, and various product demos. There’s also the keynote speech by Dr. John Holdren, former director of the Woods Hole Research Center, and currently the science advisor to President Barack Obama.

Holdren outlined the president’s commitment to science and technology, with detailed accounts of the priorities both locally and globally, as well as mention of specific spending in the economic stimulus package. Holdren then went on to relate his reliance on GIS in his work to understand global change, and the special place that GIS has in policy decisions.

At almost exactly the halfway mark of his talk, Holdren posted a slide with “The GIS Connection.” Here he declared that GIS data is fundamental to good decisions, and that geographic visualization is the most useful kind of visualization for making and understanding policy. Holdren also stated that GIS visualizations integrates different data sets and ideas, and provide new forms for coordination and collaboration.

Holdren then provided some interesting examples of government and public/private partnerships to address national and global challenges that included:

• Virtual USA - Homeland Security initiative for information sharing for emergency response, with demonstrated 70% increase in response time
• USGS Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response (PAGER)
• NOAA Remote Sensing – thousands of images used in the Haiti earthquake response
• Snowmap.gov – location of snowplows around the DC area
• U.S. Influenza Surveillance System
• Recovery.gov – GIS-based site to show where the money has gone
• EPA’s “My Environment“
• NOAA CarbonTracker - Causes and consequences of global climate change

Holdren spent a good deal of time discussing the problems of climate change, and the need for data-driven science to address adaptation. This global change as an impetus for science application and discovery was central to his entire talk, and reinforced the need and government reliance on geographic information systems.

I sat down with the principals at Earth Eye — Jason Amadano, CEO, and Mark Romano, CTO — at the SPAR 2010 Conference. I’ve known Mark for quite a while as a LIDAR and remote sensing data collection guru and custom software builder. Their new organization is funded by Data Transfer Solutions, the same outfit that Dave Bouwman and his DTSAgile team is a part of. What impresses me most about this group is their technology expertise and vision for a seamless in-house workflow from data collection through to software solutions and Internet mapping.

The idea for the company got its start when they would bid on the data processing and storage aspects of large projects. They would see the bulk of these large project budgets (on the order of 80%) go toward the collection of data, and in many instances they would be frustrated by the quality of data that they would then be working with.

With a vision in place to gain larger chunks of these projects, a team was built that could not only cover the requirements of these projects, but that could also push the envelope of integrated sensor work and improved software workflows. The team has an aerial platform for the collection of LIDAR, hyperspectral, RGB and thermal imaging. They also have built a vehicle-mounted mobile LIDAR system to collect road asset and condition information.

On top of this state-of-the-art collection capability they have built 64-bit desktop software called EarthView that is designed to load LIDAR data from its native format into any other industry standard 3D analysis format, while also performing some LIDAR data analysis.

The company just got off the ground last June, and its remarkable to see how quickly these technology pieces have been put into place. With their emphasis on streamlined workflows and processes tailored to the needs and goals of their clients, I expect that they’ll see rapid growth.

At last year’s SPAR Conference, ClearEdge3D’s automated extraction of CAD models from point clouds stood out from the crowd as a much needed tool to aid productivity. A telling story of the progression of the productivity shift that has happened with the advent of LIDAR tools is that in the past a large project may have needed five surveyors in the field with just one CAD operator. When tripod-mounted LIDAR arrived that shifted to one or two field workers, and five CAD jockeys back in the office. That further shifts with mobile LIDAR to one or two operators in the field and twenty back in the office. With this change to heavier data processing burdens, and the increasing volumes of data that accompany the more advanced collection tools and methods, there’s an obvious and glaring need for quicker and more automated processes.

The ClearEdge product fits neatly into this area, because it ingests point cloud data and automatically extracts 3D Cad models, which is often the primary workflow of a LIDAR project. Instead of gee-whiz technology this year, the emphasis of the company was on real-world applications and case studies. While the technology was being highlighted in the 3D Technologies track, users of the technology were discussing their use of the tools in their data capture workflows in the Scan to BIM conference track. The users repeatedly emphasized the time savings that they gained by adopting this automated data extraction tool.

Among the case studies that the company touted was an application by Stantec Engineering on a road and rail crossing project in one of the busiest intersections in Calgary. The constant flow of traffic meant that laser scanning was the only real option for data collection from both a safety and least amount of disruption perspective. The firm estimates that the ClearEdge tool pared down the time it tool to create the model from one week down to just four hours.

Another cased study was in the capture of a large federal building in Chicago by Ghafari Associated. There the adoption of the technology meant the elimination of redundant modeling steps to provide access to the data much more quickly. In this case, the time from scan to model was critical as the time to deliver the model was compressed. The scale and scope of this project was massive, with 500 scans of the building, and the delivery of a Revit model of the exterior and interior of the building complex.

In one year’s time, there were many more project examples across the board at this event. The company fought through the eastern snowstorms to make a delayed appearance at the event, and I’m sure they’re glad that they did. With their emphasis on productivity gains, with cost and time reductions on data processing, their product was very well received.