Caltrans — the California state agency responsible for highway, bridge and rail transportation planning, construction and maintenance — has taken delivery of the new Riegl VMX-1HA mobile mapping system.
The Riegl VMX-1HA dual-scanner mobile mapping system.
The Riegl VMX-1HA is a high-speed, high-performance dual-scanner mobile mapping system. It provides high performance and dense, accurate and feature-rich data at highway speeds.
With two million measurements and five hundred scan lines per second, the turnkey solution is suited for survey-grade mobile mapping applications to meet the standards of departments of transportation nationwide, Riegl said.
The technology of the system comprises two Riegl VUX-1HA high-accuracy waveform lidar sensors and a high-performance INS/GNSS unit, housed in an aerodynamically shaped protective cover. Four 9-megapixel cameras, along with a LadyBug 5 camera, complement the waveform lidar data with precisely georeferenced images.
The Riegl software suite provides seamless workflows for mobile data acquisition, processing, adjustments and deliverables.
Riegl USA was awarded the contract of the Request For Quote (RFQ) on the open market.
The organizers of International LiDAR Mapping Forum (ILMF) has announced the 2017 keynote lineup. The event takes place Feb. 13-15 in Denver, Colorado.
ILMF is a technical conference and exposition covering the newest airborne, terrestrial and underwater lidar as well as emerging remote-sensing and data-collection tools and technologies,
The keynote speakers are:
Larry Mayer, professor and director, School of Marine Science and Ocean Engineering, Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping, University of New Hampshire Keynote: “Challenges of Mapping the Deep Ocean: If Only Airborne Lidar Bathymetry Worked in 10,000m of Water”
Timothy Trainor, co-chair, United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management; chief of Geography Division, U.S. Census Bureau Keynote: “Role of Technology and Geospatial Information Toward Achieving UN Sustainable Development Goals”
Roy E. Wright, deputy associate administrator for Insurance and Mitigation, FEMA Keynote: “What FEMA Seeks from Geospatial Information: Risk Management, Risk Reduction”
Eric E. Poehler, associate professor of Classics and co-director, Digital Humanities Initiative; University of Massachusetts – Amherst Keynote: “Mapping Pompeii: New Discoveries with New Technologies”
“We’re honored to have such a stellar lineup to kick off the ILMF conference,” said Lisa Murray, event director. “These keynotes demonstrate the incredible breadth of uses for lidar technology — from mapping the ocean floor to mapping the ancient city of Pompeii, to using lidar for global sustainable development and for risk management and reduction.”
These leaders are among 60 aerial mapping experts at ILMF 2017 who will share their knowledge at ILMF. Other sessions will cover topics including:
Analyzing Lidar for Decision-Making
Bathymetry Lidar and Topobathy
Coastal Monitoring
Forestry
Geiger-Mode Lidar (GML) and Single-Photon Lidar (SPL): What’s the difference and why does it matter?
Landslide Detection and Mapping
Multi-Sensor and Data Fusion
New Developments In Mobile Mapping
New Technologies
Point Clouds: From Processing & Feature Extraction To Analysis & Management
Running alongside the conference is an exhibition featuring the world’s top providers of lidar and new and complementary solutions. See the exhibitor list here.
“ILMF is the best opportunity of the year for mapping professionals to learn about the newest lidar solutions, raise their technical competence, network with other practitioners, and see the latest technology,” said Ms. Murray.
LizardTech, a provider of software solutions for managing and distributing geospatial content, has unveiled lossless compression of Harris Geiger-Mode lidar data in the newest release of its GeoExpress software.
Users of GeoExpress 9.5.3 can now convert massive Geiger-Mode point clouds directly from their native binary point file (BPF) format to industry-standard MrSID files without losing data.
“Direct conversion from BPF enables GeoExpress clients to fully leverage the rich information content of Geiger-Mode lidar data sets,” said Terry Ryan, LizardTech federal government sales manager. “In addition, the compressed files are easier to process, archive and share.”
Harris has provided airborne Geiger-Mode lidar data to the U.S. government for two decades and recently rolled the technology out to the commercial sector for a variety of large-area mapping applications. Geiger-Mode employs a multi-angle illumination method to capture extremely dense point clouds of the Earth’s surface. Compared to traditional LiDAR, Geiger Mode offers higher resolution and greater information content, but in much larger data sets.
BPF is the native format used for raw Geiger-Mode data because it readily accommodates enormous files with multiple metadata and attribute fields. However, the BPF format is not supported by most commercial lidar processing software packages.
As a result, Geiger-Mode customers had to convert BPF to the more common LAS format for generation of surface models, digital elevation models and other map products. This BPF-to-LAS conversion was time consuming and lost data in the process.
GeoExpress 9.5.3 eliminates the intermediary step of converting to LAS and compresses directly to MrSID files, which can be easily processed by all commercial LiDAR software packages.
“The full information content of the Geiger-Mode LiDAR data is retained, and processing time is reduced with GeoExpress 9.5.3,” Ryan said.
GeoExpress is LizardTech’s flagship software product, enabling geospatial professionals to manipulate digital image and LiDAR data sets and compress them to MrSID or JPEG2000 files for cost-effective processing, storage and transmission. In addition to the new Geiger-Mode handling capabilities, GeoExpress 9.5.3 offers other enhancements, including advanced color balancing, default RGB transformation and easier licensing.
LizardTech, the creator of MrSID and provider of software solutions for managing and distributing geospatial content, has released GeoExpress 9.5.3. The company’s flagship image asset handling product to compress, manage, distribute, integrate and deploy geospatial images and lidar point clouds as high-quality MrSID files now has expanded format support and improved capabilities.
What’s new:
BPF Support – GeoExpress now supports Binary Point Files often used in Geiger-Mode lidar data.
NAD83(2011) Support – Reprojection tools now support EPSG CRS and Coordinate Transformations in support of NOAA’s NA2011 Project.
Better Color Balancing – Now apply correction to each band in the image.
Custom Watermarks – No longer be restricted by a size limitation for custom watermark files.
Simpler Licensing – Import a license file for single workstation licensing or add License Server Utility to add floating licenses with ease.
A fully functional free 30-day trial of GeoExpress 9.5.3 is available.
gvSIG 2.3, the new gvSIG version, is now available to download.
According to the gvSIG association, this version has been a qualitative leap — on a functional level as well as an architecture one — because of all the improvements and features.
Downloads are available from the project website, and there are two distribitions: installable and portable.
Features of this version include distributions for Mac and Windows 64-bit; PRJ file support for projections; access to Google Maps, Bing Maps or Street View; and lidar data support.
If users have questions or experience any errors, they can be sent to the user mailing list. Feedback is important to continue improving gvSIG, the association said.
A few weeks ago, I attended GEOINT 2016. It was quite different from my first GEOINT in 2007. Back then, GIS and imagery were the focus of most exhibitors and presentations, with points, line and polygons plotted on paper being the norm. This year the tradecraft seems to have evolved exponentially to a broad and significantly more sophisticated collection of technologies both on the EXPO floor and in most presentations.
New terms have solidly entered the geospatial lexicon: big data, big data analytics, exploiting social media, machine learning, activity based intelligence (ABI), predictive analytics (see my column last month), the internet of things (IoT) (see my January column), small sats, object based intelligence (OBI), cyber, human geography, open source, deep learning, machine to machine tipping & cueing, survivable space assets and the list continues to grow.
I was pleased to hear something I believed for quite a while. There is a growing consensus that Cyber attacks need to be displayed as events with geospatial components (location of servers, nodes, networks, etc.). That kind of visualization should provide valuable insight into these growing and complex attacks.
Keynotes
National Intelligence Director James Clapper.
The 75-year-old Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper poked fun at himself indicating that this would be his last year as DNI and he was counting down the days. He said that he was taught to always respect his elders but finding one was getting increasingly difficult. He also highlighted the same feeling I had that the GEOINT community has gone through some significant changes.
Computers have evolved from IBM’s 1997 Deep Blue winning only one of four chess games against Gary Kasperov to the recent contest of Google AlphaGo against the world master of the much more complex Chinese board game “Go.” AlphaGo won four of five games primarily with moves that experts called inspired genius. It did that because it was programed not to just play but to learn as it played. So “machine learning” was a frequent topic at GEOINT with it becoming a real game changer in national intelligence work.
Even imagery, the long standing bread and butter of GEOINT, is going through a revolutionary change. Citing NGA Director Cardillo, DNI Clapper indicated that we will soon evolve from limited overhead imagery available in certain locations at certain times to imagery of every spot on the globe every day of the year. You can watch Director Clapper’s full keynote.
Five awards were presented for 2016. Two of them had special interest for me — the Industry award winner ABACO Group shown in the EXPO section below and GeoHuntsville. Here is more information about the five USGIF award winners.
Community Support Achievement Award for the GeoHunstville Exemplar City program
The GeoHunstville Exemplar City program helps cities deal with disasters using new technology. Shown receiving the award for the GeoHunstville team are Chris Johnson and Joe Francica.
I was thrilled to see my adopted geospatial city, Huntsville, win the Community Support Achievement Award. The GeoHunstville Exemplar City program which assists local governments in preparing, responding, mitigating and avoiding natural and manmade disasters using new technology.
The system leverages geospatial tools including the new NGA open source collaboration environment GeoQ, UAVs and a broad array of internet accessible sensors through the IoT.
Exhibit Hall Expo
The conference attendance was over 4,000 with 250 exhibitors on the EXPO floor. You can view the full list of exhibitors at the GEOINT2016 website or by downloading the GEOINT 2016 smart phone app. The app has more information about the exhibitors including descriptions of their technology, contact info and website links. Here are samples of booths I found especially interesting.
ABACO Group:ABACO of in the United Kingdom and Italy, was given the 2016 USGIF Industry Achievement Award. ABACO received the award for their augmented reality (AR) “Farm Visor,” to help farmers access big data. One aspect that caught a lot of attention was their very elegant “X-ray” tablet viewer. The user holds the tablet up and adjust the “Transparency” of the wall they are viewing and it looks like you are looking through the wall. In reality you are viewing a geo-registered image of the surrounding area that seems like you are looking through the wall. Because of exhibit hall lights and screen reflections the
CYVIZ: CYVIZ builds easy to configure tactical operations centers that can display mixed media both classified and unclassified content in a common environment.
DIFFEO: DIFFEO is an automated search assistant that uses proprietary algorithms to speed searches of Big Data even if the operator does not know what key words need to be searched.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Software:HP had a virtual off road driving experience. IT was not as enjoyable as Birdly, a little sickening in fact. I was told by one of the users that the reason was poor synchronization between the goggle imagery and head movement.
International Spy Museum:The International Spy Museum, currently located on F Street in Washington DC will soon be building a much larger facility just south of the mall. They have also received considerable new material and collections for their exhibits.
Lead’Air: Lead’Air shows several hardware configurations to capture lidar, ortho and oblique imagery.
LizardTech:LizardTech highlighted the new ability to handle LiDAR data and display it in various ways including DEMs.
PitneyBowes:PitneyBowes was showing their latest lossless imagery compression tools along with extensive business intelligence data.
PLW Modelworks and Birdly: Most users consider PLW Modelworks the gold standard of digital 3D models. The PLW booth combined their superb 3B models with a virtual reality “flying machine” called Birdly. The machine uses Occulus Rift goggles with earphones for sound and even a fan blowing wind in your face to create a fairly realistic urban flight experience. The user can bank and turn or soar by flapping the wings. I tried it and it was nice.
SigmaSpace:SigmaSpace was showing their single photon LiDAR. Their system is supposed to do a much better job discerning first and second level returns so collecting true ground elevation under a tree canopies is faster, more accurate with greater point density. Being a green laser it may also prove more effective in littoral work.
TerraGo:TerraGo was demonstrating Edge as a tool to simplify data collection in the field using mobile devices.
According to a new market research report published by MarketsandMarkets, the Lidar drone market was valued US$16.1 million in 2015 and is estimated to reach US$144.6 million by 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.2% between 2016 and 2022.
The full report is titled “Lidar Drone Market by Product (Rotary Wing, and Fixed Wing), Component, Application (Corridor Mapping, Archaeology, Construction, Environment, Entertainment, and Precision Agriculture), Geography — Global Forecast to 2022,” and is available through the MarketsandMarkets website.
The 125-page report includes and 66 market data tables and 42 figures.
Factors such as technological superiority, encouragement from governments and institutes for adoption of lidar drones, and its use in emerging applications such as precision farming are the key drivers for the growth of the lidar drone market. The use of lidar drones for delivering products generates further opportunities for lidar drone manufacturers.
Rotary-wing. The rotary-wing lidar drone market is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The ability of rotary-wing lidar drones to take off without runways and its high degree of maneuverability are the reasons for the high growth of this market.
Corridor mapping. The corridor mapping application held the largest share of the market in 2015. Highway corridors are built after proper planning and designing to ensure that they can withstand the pressure exerted by vehicles on a regular basis.
As highway projects are constructed from a long-term perspective, it is necessary to conduct a thorough feasibility study of the terrain on which the highway is to be constructed. Lidar drones provide this information by building three-dimensional (3D) elevation models of the surveyed area.
Infrastructure development is further expected to increase in coming years, which would, in turn, lead to increased usage of lidar drones for inspecting the growth of the infrastructure project. These benefits drive the market in the corridor mapping application.
North America. The North American market held the largest share of the global lidar drone market in 2015. The increasing awareness about the benefits of lidar drones such as high accuracy and low cost is one of the reasons for the large market share of the North American lidar drone market. The use of lidar drones in precision farming is driving the lidar drone market in North America.
Major players. The major players operating in this market are Velodyne Lidar (U.S.), Phoenix Aerial Systems (U.S), Riegl Laser Measurement Systems GmbH (Austria), SICK AG (Germany), and YellowScan (France), 3D Robotics, Inc. (U.S.), DJI (China), FARO Technology (U.S.), Leica Geosystems AG (Switzerland), Optech, Inc. (Canada) and Trimble Navigation Limited (U.S.).
The research report categorizes the global lidar drone market on the basis of components, products, applications and geography. It describes the drivers, restraints, opportunities and challenges in the lidar drone market. The Porter’s five forces analysis has been included in the report with a description of each of its forces and its respective impact on the market.
Related Reports
Lidar Market by Product (Aerial, Ground-based, and UAV LiDAR), Component, Application (Corridor Mapping, Engineering, Environment, ADAS, Urban Planning, Exploration, and Metrology), Services and Geography – Global Forecast to 2022
UAV Drones Market by Type (Fixed Wing, Rotary Blade, Nano, Hybrid), Application (Law Enforcement, Precision Agriculture, Media and Entertainment, Retail), & Geography (Americas, Europe, APAC, RoW) – Analysis & Forecast to 2020
Quanergy Systems, a provider of lidar sensors and smart sensing solutions, is offering a new sensor.
Quanergy’s S3 lidar sensor
The S3-Qi is a miniature solid-state lidar sensor that is 15 percent the size of the previous solid-state model, the S3. Quanergy is displaying the new sensor along with its other products in Booth 767 at AUVSI’s Xponential May 3-5 in New Orleans.
The S3-Qi, offered four months after the original S3, has a smaller 1 inch by 1.5-inch footprint, weighs about 100 grams and has low power consumption. The small form factor, combined with a cost-effective design, makes the S3-Qi well suited for applications such as drones, intelligent robotics, security, smart homes and industrial automation.
Mass production of the S3-Qi is targeted for the first quarter of 2017.
“We are excited to raise the bar, once again, with the expansion of our product portfolio,” said Louay Eldada, Quanergy CEO. “We continue to push the boundaries on behalf of our customers. The S3-Qi is a testament to our focus on the user and our investment in innovation for game-changing smart sensing solutions offered at price points that make their use ubiquitous. In drones, payload and battery runtime benefit greatly from our compact sensors.”
Quanergy’s lidar sensors have applications in more than 30 market verticals including security, transportation, terrestrial and aerial mapping, and industrial automation.
A Sanborn fire insurance map of the Chicago Union Stockyards from 1890 (Image: Library of Congress)
Founded in 1866 to produce fire insurance maps, the current Sanborn Map Company offers high-tech mapping services that include mobile and aerial light detection and ranging (lidar), aerial oblique imagery and orthoimagery, 3D visualization, autonomous robotic indoor mapping, FAA-approved unmanned aircraft system (UAS) services and more.
Sanborn made key contributions to America’s World War II effort, secretly housing classified Allied invasion maps critical to the D-Day invasion of Normandy in its historic Pelham, New York, building. That building is 110 years old this year, and Westchester County has declared April 20 as “Sanborn Map Building Day” to honor both the building and company anniversaries.
Sanborn’s legendary fire insurance maps are distinctive because of their sophisticated set of symbols that precisely and clearly convey complex information. The Library of Congress Sanborn map collection includes 50,000 editions of the maps comprising an estimated 700,000 individual sheets dating back to 1867. The maps depict commercial, industrial and residential sections of 12,000 cities and towns across the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
A sample of Sanborn’s oblique imagery. (Photo: Sanborn)
Today, Sanborn has embraced modern geospatial technology, pioneering the collection and delivery of digital orthoimagery and collecting and processing high resolution oblique aerial imagery and designing derivative products.
The firm has a vast oblique imagery collection. In 2015, Sanborn added 2.8 million new images to its Oblique Imagery Solutions database and provides proprietary tools, such as Sanborn Oblique Analyst software, so its customers can extract the maximum value from the imagery.
Sanborn also offers 6-inch resolution orthoimagery covering the entire continental U.S. in both natural color and infrared products, and has one of the industry’s widest range of 3D, off-the-shelf mapping products. These include 3D Buildings, a suite of modeling products designed for 3D visualization and geographic information system (GIS) applications; 3D Cities for virtual city implementation; and CitySets, which comprise digital datasets covering the core downtown areas of most major U.S metropolitan areas.
Woolpert has signed a five-year, multimillion-dollar Geospatial Product and Services Contract 3 (GPSC 3) with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to provide mapping and surveying services.
The GPSC is a suite of contracts used by federal, state and municipal government entities to partner with USGS for the purpose of fulfilling their geospatial data requirements.
The contract will be administered through the National Geospatial Technical Operations Center (NGTOC) in an effort to obtain geospatial data services throughout the United States and its territories. The contract also will be used to support the 3D Elevation Program (3DEP) and used by other federal, state and local agencies.
“This provides Woolpert with the opportunity to continue working with USGS on their 3D Elevation Program (3DEP), an eight-year program to provide highly accurate 3D elevation data of the entire U.S.,” said John Gerhard, Woolpert project director. “This data will be collected via lidar (light detection and ranging) to create the most accurate surface model, and will be used to evaluate flood risk and natural resources, support FEMA, help farmers with precision agriculture, assess and manage infrastructure, and much more.”
Jeff Lovin, Woolpert senior vice president and director of government solutions, said the Woolpert staff is proud to have had the opportunity to work with the USGS for nearly 25 years. “Over those 25 years, we’ve had the opportunity to collaborate on different layers of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), from the development of nationwide imagery in the 1990s to 3D elevation and hydrography today,” Lovin said.”It’s very gratifying to have the opportunity to play a part in such an important program for our nation.”
LizardTech, the creator of MrSID and provider of software solutions for managing and distributing geospatial content, has released GeoExpress 9.5.1. The company’s flagship product for compressing geospatial images and lidar data into high-quality MrSID files now has a streamlined interface, faster processing and support for .pix raster files.
“Last year, we introduced the ability to compress raster and LiDAR imagery to MrSID and LAZ formats,” said Robert Parker, LizardTech product owner. “With GeoExpress 9.5.1, we’re excited to introduce a beautiful new design, seamless mosaicking of LiDAR files and the added choice to compress .pix raster files to MrSID.”
GeoExpress 9.5.1 features include:
Intuitive User Interface (UI): An updated look and streamlined interface make this version more user-friendly while delivering top-quality compressed and manipulated images.
Seamless mosaicking of LiDAR files: Seamless mosaicking of LiDAR files supplements lossless compression that uses four times less storage space.
Faster default workflow for existing MrSID images: Processing of MrSID files is now faster by default when working with existing MrSID files, with cropping, editing, despeckling, AOI, tiling and more.
New Format Support: Compression of PCIs standard .pix raster files to MrSID for greater flexibility.
From (L to R) John Palatiello, MAPPS executive Director; Jim Green; Mike Sitar and Michel Stanier of Optech Teledyne.
Teledyne Optech‘s ALTM Titan lidar sensor earned the 2015 Grand Award in the ninth annual MAPPS Geospatial Products and Services Excellence Awards, MAPPS recently announced in a news release. The awards ceremony was held Feb. 2 at the Green Valley Ranch in Henderson, Nev.
Teledyne was also presented with an award in the Technology Innovation category.
The company said in a news release that Titan is easy to handle in complex scenarios, such as acquiring three wavelengths simultaneously; incorporating a metric camera imbedded in the system; creating a sensor that fits in a 16-inch gyro-stabilized mount; and increasing the depth penetration of the bathymetric sensor. To achieve this, Vaughan, Ontario-based Teledyne Optech had to develop new fiber lasers and a triple wavelength receiver which allowed for the collection of bathymetric lidar, topographic lidar and multispectral lidar in one single sensor.
“Teledyne Optech’s ALTM Titan is a marvel in lidar engineering,” said Robert Burtch PS, CP, professor emeritus at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich., and chairman of the panel of judges. “This development allows the collection of bathymetric lidar, topographic lidar and multispectral lidar in one single sensor.”
The MAPPS awards competition recognizes the professionalism, value, integrity and achievement that member firms have demonstrated in their projects and technology developments over the previous year.
MAPPS also honored winners in six technical categories.
Woolpert of Dayton, Ohio, was selected in the Photogrammetry/Elevation Data Generation category with the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument Headstone Mapping Project that utilized lidar to locate and map 4,320 headstones and 280 battlefield markers.
The winning project in the Remote Sensing category was by Aerial Services Inc. of Cedar Falls, Iowa, for The Race for Now: Maximizing Crop Yields Using Innovations in Remote Sensing project, which acquired imagery using multiple sensors during the critical growing phases to produce a web-based precision agriculture service in the State of Iowa.
In the GIS/IT category, Merrick & Company of Greenwood Village, Colo., was selected for GIS Models Visualize Ancient Flooding Problems in the country of Columbia. As project manager, Merrick provided technology transfer and GIS data and training, and introduced a new methodology, “monotonicity,” which guarantees that acoustic bathymetry, lidar and breaklines are correctly integrated.
The winner in the Surveying/Field Data Collection category was the Baltimore, Md., office of AECOM for its Protocol for Determining Grass Channel Credits project. Using GIS, lidar and aerial imagery, AECOM worked with the Maryland State Highway Administration to identify roadway ditches to assure compliance with the Department of the Environment grass channel treatment criteria.
TerraSond of Palmer, Ark., earned the award in the Small Projects category for the Bradley Lake Hydro Power project. TerraSond teamed to perform an inspection of a diversion tunnel to a dam and power tunnel inlet in Homer, Alaska to identify the quantity of debris that was covering the inlet screen by comparing the debris profile with the as-built drawings to determine the amount of debris that needed to be removed.
Titan, Teledyne Optech’s multi-spectral lidar sensor, also won in the Technology Innovation category.
A panel of independent judges evaluated projects submitted by MAPPS members for the awards program.
