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By Mathias Lemmens, senior editor, GIM International Our first product survey on Airborne Lidar Processing Software appeared exactly three years ago (see GIM International, February 2007). Half the companies listed n the 2007 survey were based in Germany and the other half in the US; none came from other countries. Remarkably, half the respondents in the present survey too hail from Germany, given that Trimble's contribution actually refers to a product from Inpho GmbH, headquartered in Stuttgart. None of the four US companies listed in the 2007 survey responded to the present questionnaire; the only US firm listed, Virtual Geomatics, based in Austin, Texas, is new to our records. Another company new to our survey is Tiltan of Israel, listed with TLiD, software developed for creating 3D maps and GIS data from Lidar point-clouds in a highly automated manner. Since the turn of the millennium airborne Lidar has become an essential data-acquisition technology for detailed and accurate digital elevation models (DEM) and the creation of 3D models of objects such as buildings, power-lines, trees and stands of forest. Most systems listed can process raw Lidar data stemming from a wide diversity of acquisition systems. However, Geocode and GeocodeWF from GeoLas Consulting are specifically dedicated to automatically geocoding raw Lidar data acquired by respectively the Riegl LMS-Q120/240/280 series and LMS-Q560. Apart from processing the point-cloud data to produce geocoded DEMs, high-resolution Lidar data enables automated feature extraction when appropriate software modules are applied. The strength of any Lidar processing software can be judged by its ability to extract features from raw point-clouds. Which particular features can be extracted by the diverse software systems can be examined in the section ‘Analysis'. All providers listed provide training support and all systems use Windows as operating systems, up to XP, Vista or Windows 7. For a brief overview of typical operations performed by ALPS on Lidar data, see this month's Endpoint. |
