LIDAR
LIDAR has become a major portion of my geomatics career and was the main focus of my graduate research project that I completed at the Applied Geomatics Research Group and the Centre of Geographic Sciences in Nova Scotia. The data that I processed and products that I generated are helping Environment Canada and other Government Organizations to create adaptation strategies to coastal flooding problems in the Maritime Provinces. This site is meant to provide a brief understanding of the technology while demonstrating some of the highlights of my projects.
Basic overview of LIDAR
The aircraft uses a high precision Global Position System (GPS) and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to determine the location and measure the attitude so that the ground location of the return pulse can be accurately determined.
The LIDAR sensor produces a series of point measurements that consists of geographic location (X & Y) and height (Z) of both natural and man-made features, and can be further processed to produce several different products and integrated into a Geographic Information System (GIS).
The data produced from a LIDAR sensor in its most common form, is often represented by
a series of spatial coordinates in an American Standard Code for Information Interchange
file (ASCII). The data in the file is recorded in a tabular format where each line has
coordinate information separated by a common delimiter. The data can include other attribute
information for each point as well. There are additional ways to represent LIDAR data such
as LAS format, which is an alternative to the generic ASCII file format used by many companies.
Resultant LIDAR data is usually a very dense network of coordinate points and can often
contain millions of measurements for a given area. This can result into large file sizes,
depending on the collection area and data resolution, which has been known to be difficult
to handle with the majority of common off the shelf software packages. Continue to my
2004 LIDAR research project.