Night-time Mobile Mapping of Road Surface Luminance

Capturing Road Environment Lighting Inventories Using a Luminance-calibrated Mobile Mapping System

Lighting – which is measured in luminance plays a key role in improving road safety. A new measurement system is now being deveoped to evaluate night-time road lighting conditions based on luminance-calibrated 3D point cloud data. This new approach integrates imaging photometry, which is commonly used to measure road lighting, with mobile laser scanning techniques, which are mainly used to measure the 3D geometry of the road environment. There are many interesting potential applications of the resulting georeferenced luminance point cloud. In road traffic, the role of illumination is to improve the visibility of the road and the surrounding environment.... (read more)

2019-12-11 10:10:24

Lidar Monitoring of Rock Glaciers with Improved Measurement Frequency

The 3D Geospatial Data Processing Group from Heidelberg University in Germany is conducting studies of rock glacier dynamics in a high-Alpine permafrost environment. The team is utilizing a RIEGL VZ-2000i terrestrial laser scanner and a UAV equipped with the RIEGL miniVUX-1UAV unmanned laser scanner. This fascinating research project is leading to new insights into rock glaciers. Short-interval (e.g. < monthly) topographic Lidar monitoring has begun to provide new understandings into a range of geomorphic processes. Such 4D data help us to better understand the dynamics of rock glaciers. Rock glaciers are creep phenomena of mountain permafrost. In the era of climate change, rock glaciers... (read more)

2019-12-06 09:47:53

Copernicus Data and AI to Combat Climate Change

Europe’s Earth observation programme Copernicus provides open access to up-to-date information on topics such as climate and land management. Such data holds huge potential for companies, entrepreneurs and start-ups to develop new solutions to tackle global challenges. Green City Watch combines big data from space with artificial intelligence (AI) to measure the quality of urban green space. This pioneering technology was honoured as the 2019 Overall Winner of the international innovation competition Copernicus Masters during its Awards Ceremony on 4 December in Helsinki, Finland. According to research published by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction in October 2018,... (read more)

2019-12-05 10:17:22

Advancement in Remote Sensing Technology Enhances Large-scale Forest Health Assessment

State-of-the-art geospatial data collection and modelling to assess, monitor and forecast the quality, health and value of local forestlands is the focus of a new NASA-funded project led by the University of Maine, USA. The research team will use remote sensing technology to develop comprehensive models with more detailed, accurate, higher-resolution and near-real-time data on forest-tree species identification, and forest-tree decline detection and damage assessment. The three-year project, funded by a nearly US$750,000 NASA grant, is led by Parinaz Rahimzadeh, assistant professor of remote sensing of natural resources in the University of Maine (UMaine) School of Forest Resources. Ultimately, the... (read more)

2019-12-03 10:17:57

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

French Experiences with UAV Lidar for Power Line Inspection

RTE, the electricity transmission system operator of France, is in charge of maintenance and repairs for over 100,000km of electricity power lines. When the company started to consider solutions to complement helicopters, it chose Delair to deliver the solution to map and digitize power line corridors: a fixed-wing drone equipped with Lidar. Data from Lidar sensors is now at the core of its vegetation encroachment detection process. Here, RTE UAV pilots share their experiences with aerial Lidar data acquisition technology. RTE manages power line inspection with Lidar drone to detect vegetation encroachment. Its mission is to direct the flow of... (read more)

2019-11-22 10:03:26

CORS Networks Harnessed for Global Error Mapping

There are more than five billion satnav devices on Earth. Along with smartphones and mobile receivers, this figure includes networks of continuously operating receiver stations (CORS) used to improve accuracy. A European Space Agency-led project will harness these networks to provide an ongoing overview of satnav performance from the global to national and regional scale. “The general assumption is that global navigation satellite system (GNSS) services can always be relied on, which is true 99% of the time,” comments Michael Pattinson of Nottingham Scientific Ltd in the UK, which is developing this new project for ESA. “That’s fine for the... (read more)

2019-11-20 11:19:42

InSAR Satellite Technology Data Fills Niche for Forest Inventory

Remote sensing is a great way to learn more about our forests and manage them accordingly. Scion, a New Zealand government-owned research institute, is exploring new information-capture methods such as synthetic aperture radar (SAR). A recent study found that, while Lidar is still much more precise for predicting forest attributes, interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) has several other benefits to consider. Remote sensing involves recording data about an object, without making contact with the object. Interferometric SAR (InSAR) satellite technology is one method that has been used to perform forest inventory overseas, but a study that was conducted recently is... (read more)

2019-11-18 11:27:12

How Drones Contribute to Mapping Iceland's Disappearing Glaciers

A new 3D process which involves old aerial photos and modern-day drone photography has shed light on accelerated ice loss from some of Iceland's largest glaciers. Dr Kieran Baxter from the UK's University of Dundee has created composite images that compare views from 1980s aerial surveys to modern-day photos captured with the help of state-of-the-art technology. This revolutionary technique has allowed Dr Baxter to document the dramatic ice loss on a group of outlet glaciers on the south side of Vatnajökull, one of the largest ice caps in Europe. Aerial mapping photographs taken by the National Land Survey of Iceland... (read more)

2019-11-12 10:35:03

Esri Joins Forces with 3DR to Launch ArcGIS Drone Collection

Esri has announced that it has partnered with 3DR, a leading US drone data company, to expand Esri's current drone imagery offering, Drone2Map for ArcGIS, with an end-to-end enterprise drone data and analytics solution for the ArcGIS platform. The ArcGIS Drone Collection offers scalable solutions for users ranging from small operators to enterprise-wide drone programmes. Esri customers can now achieve operational efficiency by leveraging the elastic processing capabilities of the cloud. By adding 3DR's powerful Site Scan unmanned aerial systems flight planning and processing software to ArcGIS, users benefit by having extensive and powerful drone flight planning and image processing,... (read more)

2019-11-13 11:35:59