Imaging Notes – Winter 2010 – Beyond Terrain Models: LiDAR Enters the Geospatial Mainstream

First used by NASA in the mid-1980s, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) has become an essential complement to photogrammetry for mapping and analyzing a vast range of surfaces. LiDAR started as a topographic tool on large scale projects, such as flood plain mapping, but in the past few years it has gained wide acceptance throughout the geospatial industry for a myriad of projects – including 3D urban modeling, feature extraction, tree identification and volumetrics, mapping bare earth under thick canopy, road delineation, forward looking for vehicles, mobile mapping, and carbon inventory. Ground-based LiDAR is becoming as common as aerial applications.