European Lidar Mapping Forum 2010 With Nearly 600

Alastair MacDonald, conference Chairman opened the first-ever European Lidar Mapping event on Tuesday 30th November, welcoming a multitude of guests from 42 countries looking at airborne, bathymetric and mobile mapping applications of Lidar. "Laser scanners are becoming smaller, faster and cheaper, leading to new opportunities," he said. "Applications are becoming more differentiated as more integrated and complex data comes together," he added.

 
 
MacDonald mentioned that we are seeing data processing become increasingly important and driving a whole new range of applications. Indeed, many of the opening day presentations described the capture and data processing efforts ranging from national digital elevation models in Sweden to the need for processing architecture to handle large Lidar databases. The latest market step change of Mobile Mapping is already delivering exponential reductions in the time and cost of performing urban and highway surveys.

George Vosselman, Professor at the University Twente, The Netherlands gave the keynote address to a packed out conference room that described many issues surrounding the current use of Lidar hardware and software.

Other sessions that were so popular there was nearly standing room only included the bathymetric Lidar sessions and the Data Processing sessions with particular reference to Hugo Ledoux from Delft University of Technology whose paper talked about storing and analysing massive aerial Lidar datasets in a DBMS.

The conference ended on Wednesday 1st December offering much to see including further Mobile Mapping sessions, talks on recent projects and technology developments and trends. There is also a poster session, talks within the Basics to Lidar workshop series and over 50 exhibitors within the exhibition hall.