Creating 3D Buildings and Trees with Global Mapper Lidar Module

Blue Marble Geographics has announced the release of the Lidar Module for Global Mapper version 16. This major upgrade includes the ability to quickly identify and classify building and vegetation points in unclassified Lidar data, a new tool to automate the feature extraction process for creating 3D vector buildings and trees, and significantly improved automatic classification of ground points.

The Lidar Module is an optional add-on for Global Mapper, an affordable and easy-to-use GIS application capable of displaying, converting, and analysing virtually any type of geospatial data. With the Lidar Module, Global Mapper users can quickly view and process Lidar point clouds containing a billion points or more. The Lidar Module offers an array of post-processing tools that enable the querying, filtering, editing, reclassifying, and exporting of Lidar data. This release features a variety of updates to both the Global Mapper base product and the Lidar Module. 

More points

Many of the enhancements in version 16 of the Lidar Module have been designed to improve the quality of the raw point cloud by offering the means to fully utilise significantly more points. Advanced algorithms that distinguish building points and vegetation allow previously unclassified points to be used for precise structural modelling and biomass analysis. Improved ground point detection means that gridded terrain layers derived from these recycled points are generated at a much higher resolution.

Additional upgrades to the Lidar Module include support for filtering Lidar point clouds by elevation range, colour, allowed classes, scan angle range, or point source IDs prior to gridding or exporting as well new functionality for creating a gridded surface model using return intensity or height above ground values rather than elevation. As an enhancement to the existing ability to colorise points by the RGB value from an underlying aerial image, the new release offers the option to colourise point clouds by the calculated difference in return values.

For a complete list of new features and enhancements see here.