1. Making Lasers Useful

3.  Small but growing company, ~ 35 office
employees plus flight staff
 Located in Fredericton, N.B.
 Fly projects throughout North America, largely
focusing on Eastern Canada and the U.S.
 Process LiDAR data and create products for
clients: DEMs, DSMs, etc.
Aircraft

4.  Get a project through bidding or other contract
talks
 Create a planned flightpath based on the project
area
 Fly the project, sometimes spanning several flights
on multiple days. This can occasionally require
more than one plane
 Process the trajectory and information from the
laser system to determine where the plane was and
where the points are in 3d space
 Create a digital product based on client
specifications
1pt/m² 6pt/m²

5.  Largely, I take the raw data from the plane and
create LAS files that can then be used by
different GIS software (Arc, Global Mapper,
etc) to create the products
 This processing includes determining the
accurate position of the plane in 3d space, and
then processing the raw laser data into
something more useful

6.  A system on board the plane uses a high
quality GPS and IMU to determine where the
plane is at that moment in time
 By having a measurement every second, we
can process these into a single trajectory that is
useful for later processing

7. POSPac showing base stations located around a study area

8.  I do!
 Knowing what the plane was
doing is incredibly important
 The information from the laser
only tells us how far the point
was from the plane, it has no
geographic information
associated
 We need to use the information
from where the plane was to
associate the returns with a
geographic coordinate

9.  Comes a full
waveform data –
multiple possible
returns to be used
 These returns need
to be extracted to be
used as points
 Done with software

10.  MTA – Depending
on altitude and pulse
rate, more than one
pulse can be in the
air at one time
 Need to determine
which Zone you are
in to ensure the
software interprets
returns correctly

11.  We know where the LiDAR sensor was based
on the trajectory processed earlier
 We know how far the returns are from the
aircraft based on the already processed raw
waveform data
 Bringing these together allows us to place them
on the earth, with a projection if required

12.  Hopefully at this point, nothing went wrong
 More than likely, something did
 Visual inspections are made to see whether the
different flight lines are “tight” to one another
 If they aren’t, some adjustments can be made
 If these adjustments won’t work, a better
trajectory may help fix some of the issues
 If the data is unrecoverable, the flight needs to
be done again – an expensive proposition

15.  Create LAS files to further QC data
 Use points collected by survey to see whether
or not the data agrees with where the ground is
 If points agree with reality, and the final area
covered by the LAS fits with the area
determined by the client, I’m done!

16.  Quite well
 Although we never covered how to do this
type of work, the ideas behind the process were
explained well enough that I feel after a little
training I am already able to be useful

17.  COGS
 Leading Edge Geomatics