Downtown Dublin as a Lidar Point Cloud

A Highly Accurate, Diverse and Dense Annotated Laser Scanning Dataset of a City Centre

The advance of Lidar data acquisition technologies is substantially increasing the amount of spatial data obtained and it is becoming cost-prohibitive to process it manually. Artificial intelligence (AI) has now started to offer cost-effective solutions to analyse and utilize those big datasets. AI can be employed for scene understanding, accurately detecting objects and classifying 3D assets. These are the significant fundamentals of several applications including autonomous navigation, intelligent robotics, urban planning, emergency management and even forest monitoring. The most popular types of 3D spatial information for such applications are Lidar and imagery data. This article describes the dense annotated ground-truth... (read more)

2019-11-27 10:05:38

Sensors, Satellites and Science: the Power of Geoinformation

Review of ISPRS Geospatial Week 2019

Every two years, the photogrammetry and remote sensing community gathers at the ISPRS Geospatial Week. The event comprises a combination of workshops organized by various ISPRS Working Groups and other stakeholders involved in the geospatial profession. The 2019 edition, which was held from 10-14 June in Enschede, situated in the eastern part of the Netherlands, proved to be a true geospatial hub bringing together a wide range of geomatics-related activities and applications. Creating a better, safer world – that broadly sums up the objective of the ISPRS Geospatial Week participants. With projects covering innovations for land tenure, an efficient method... (read more)

2019-08-29 08:25:35

Infrastructure Group Benefits from Drone Technology in Smart Motorways Project

The international infrastructure group Balfour Beatty is reaping the rewards of using drones on major construction projects, including work on a multi-million-pound 'Smart Motorway' upgrade in the Midlands region of the UK with support from UAV specialist Heliguy. The group is utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or 'drones'), including the recently released DJI Phantom 4 RTK, to enhance safety, increase efficiency, gather data faster, improve asset productivity and gain high-accuracy results. The UAVs are being used for quicker stockpile measurements, informative aerial progress reports and accessing hard-to-reach areas. Balfour Beatty has turned to drone expert Heliguy as its preferred supplier,... (read more)

2019-04-09 10:39:43

Bringing BIM Down to Earth

‘BIM’ is a hot topic in the industry, receiving regular coverage at many conferences, seminars and webinars. A lot of companies predict that it is one of the ‘next big things’ for the future, and a not inconsiderable number of companies are already working with BIM today. And that’s a good thing! But it is perhaps wise to look past the hype and keep our feet firmly on the ground. Tomas Sandström from Adtollo brings some nuance into the BIM discussion in this column. BIM stands for ‘building information modelling’, or perhaps ‘building information management’. The best thing about BIM... (read more)

2019-01-24 02:20:34

GAF Wins Framework Contract for the Validation of Innovative Geospatial Tools

GAF AG, together with e-GEOS, has been awarded a framework contract by the European Union Satellite Centre for the provision of satellite-based digital elevation models to support the validation of innovative geospatial tools for SatCen’s exploitation activities. These digital elevation models have a resolution of between 0.5m and 10m and are generated using a highly automated multi-source production line. Additionally, the products are delivered with different quality layers and traceability layers, and the corresponding metadata is adapted to the user’s requirements. For nearly 20 years, GAF has been providing different institutional and private customers worldwide with various types of high-quality... (read more)

2019-01-09 01:36:55

Web GIS Improves Lidar Collection Response Time

The LMAP Initiative

The remarkable capabilities of airborne Lidar continue to improve, with scanners now able to emit more than a million pulses every second. Although it has never been easier to acquire high-quality laser data, storing and managing the huge volume of Lidar data collected can prove to be a challenge. Combined with associated metadata such as survey information, environmental conditions and flight lines, data management has now become a critical priority and focus. This article outlines a new initiative called LMAP that provides an automated workflow for uploading and storing Lidar and metadata into GIS. Developed in a partnership between RIEGL of... (read more)

2018-11-06 11:07:08

How Esri Is Putting Effort into Drone Mapping

5 Questions to... Cody Benkelman, imagery product manager at Esri

In early September 2018, it was announced that Esri and 3DR have partnered up to develop Site Scan Esri Edition. This end-to-end package includes full mission planning to easily capture and display data from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or ‘drones’), and a simple workflow which enables use of the data in Esri ArcGIS. We asked Cody Benkelman, imagery product manager at Esri, for more details on this cooperation, how Esri is involved in drone mapping and what’s in it for geospatial professionals. Esri is partnering with 3DR to develop Site Scan Esri Edition. Why is this important news for mapping... (read more)

2018-10-31 04:50:40

Chasing BIM: How Surveyors Can Shape the Future

Greater Utilisation of Technologies at Hand

While research shows that many organizations recognise the power of building information modelling (BIM) for streamlining construction and infrastructure projects in a seamless online environment, survey and geospatial professionals can do more to deliver value in the 3D environment. There have been countless presentations and papers on the definition of BIM. This article makes an attempt to provide some practical insights on how surveyors can leverage the BIM revolution to benefit their businesses. The good news: there is a general consensus among geospatial thought leaders that the design and construction industry has reached a tipping point. The more that surveyors... (read more)

2018-10-04 09:20:39

NSW Launches Cloud-based Service to Manage Cadastre Data

A cloud-based cadastre-as-a-service platform in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, has gone live to overhaul the state's approach to managing cadastral data. Representing a major upgrade to the process for maintaining and updating the NSW cadastre, the new API-based system is primarily aimed at reducing duplication of data and effort by becoming the automated backbone of the development-application submission process for councils. Replacing a system whereby hard-copy plans were routinely accepted and manually scanned by Spatial Services, the new submission process automatically extracts data and metadata from digital plans, and images are converted to LandXML. Under the new system, the... (read more)

2018-09-26 10:50:25

Let’s Embrace It… INSPIRE is Here to Stay

Big Challenges to Overcome towards a Common Framework for all European Environmental Reference Data

The idea behind INSPIRE is quite simple: a common framework for all European environmental reference data. The implementation of such a system, however, is less simple. Technology is one thing – but when 38 European countries have to deliver their data, preferably in such a way that they are interoperable, anyone can see that there are big challenges to overcome. Stefan Jensen is head of data governance at the European Environmental Agency (EEA), one of the European institutions that would profit from a harmonised environmental data system and fulfils a coordinating role in the implementation. With the next INSPIRE conference... (read more)

2018-08-08 01:39:23