At this year’s Rocket City Geospatial Conference, Hexagon companies Intergraph and Leica Geosystems conducted a comprehensive LiDAR workshop that illustrated the power and utility of this burgeoning technology, and showcased combined tools that unlock the value of its data. The series of presentations are now available on-demand.
Disaster response was a key theme of the conference, reflecting the tornado outbreak throughout Alabama this past spring. The theme was echoed in workshop presentations that explored the advantages of using point clouds for disaster planning, response, impact assessment, and recovery efforts. Other highlighted applications benefiting from the use of LiDAR included transportation management and the remote detection of taxable construction by local governments.
Leica Geosystems introduced the inner workings of LiDAR and the resultant point clouds, outlining the benefits offered over other remote sensing technologies. Intergraph presented software products (ERDAS and GeoMedia) that enable organizations to leverage LiDAR and point clouds and which, by working together, form an integrated system capable of managing an organization’s entire LiDAR workflow.
These workflows are enabled by extensions to GeoMedia®, a GIS management package that provides access to geospatial data in almost any form and unites them in a single view for efficient editing and analysis. GeoMedia® Grid provides seamless integration of vector and grid (raster) data formats for viewing and analysis. The product features LiDAR Workbench, a rich set of tools for manipulating LiDAR data to create high-resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) and full vector contours. These LiDAR-based DEMs can then be displayed using GeoMedia® 3D, which enables three-dimensional visualization and analysis within the GeoMedia environment. With GeoMedia 3D, you can dynamically integrate surfaces, imagery, feature data, and vector data and LiDAR-based DEMs to provide a 3D view of all data sources in a single map window. GeoMedia 3D also enables the creation of a flight path that facilitates viewing objects of interest from multiple angles, for more thorough inspection. GeoMedia® Smart Client brings the analysis and editing capabilities to more users by providing configurable geospatial workflows across the enterprise.
Another application critical to a successful LiDAR workflow is ERDAS APOLLO, the market leading enterprise solution for managing and delivering distributed geospatial data and imagery. ERDAS APOLLO can automatically catalog point cloud data. End users can then search this catalog using queries based on metadata and spatial extents, preview the results of the queries, and download the data in either the original LAS format or as a DEM.
For organizations without a significant archive of LiDAR data, Intergraph offers LPS eATE, a pixel correlation application that uses distributed processing to create high density point clouds from stereo imagery. Additionally, users can classify the points or even encode each point with the RGB value of the pixel from which it was derived to generate a photorealistic point cloud. LPS eATE can also serve as a valuable supplement to LiDAR archives, facilitating change detection by creating point clouds from historical imagery for comparison to current LiDAR data.
To learn more about Intergraph’s LiDAR capabilities, please see the recordings from the workshop or the LiDAR page on our website.
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About Intergraph
Intergraph is the leading global provider of engineering and geospatial software that enables customers to visualize complex data. Businesses and governments in more than 60 countries rely on Intergraph’s industry-specific software to organize vast amounts of data to make processes and infrastructure better, safer and smarter. The company’s software and services empower customers to build and operate more efficient plants and ships, create intelligent maps, and protect critical infrastructure and millions of people around the world.
Intergraph operates through two divisions: Process, Power & Marine (PP&M) and Security, Government & Infrastructure (SG&I). Intergraph PP&M provides enterprise engineering software for the design, construction, operation and data management of plants, ships and offshore facilities. Intergraph SG&I provides geospatially powered solutions including ERDAS technologies to the public safety and security, defense and intelligence, government, transportation, photogrammetry, and utilities and communications industries. Intergraph Government Solutions (IGS) is an independent subsidiary for SG&I’s U.S. federal and classified business.
Intergraph is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hexagon AB, (Nordic exchange: HEXA B) and (Swiss exchange: HEXN).For more information, visit www.intergraph.com and www.hexagon.com.
