The International LIDAR Mapping Forum (ILMF) took place in Denver, Colo. from March 3-5, 2010. The event drew more than 500 attendees and 60 exhibiting companies. The program placed both an emphasis on research and innovation as well as application, with a mix of process oriented sessions, the strategies and hurdles of collection, and innovative LIDAR applications.

The attendees at ILMF 2010 had their choice of a good variety of sessions that were delivered by a good mix of industry, academia, policy creators and practitioners. The primary track centered on bathyetric LIDAR, data fusion, data acquisition and mobile LIDAR. The fact that LIDAR processing is still in its infancy, with hardware far exceeding the capability of software, was very apparent at the event. With each detailed use case presentation the focus of the question and answer period largely revolved around process issues as users quizzed each other to learn methodology and best practices.

Keynote Highlights Steps to a National Standard

The opening address by H. Karl Heidemann seemed somewhat of an odd choice to lead off the event with its in-depth focus on the LIDAR Base Specification that is being developed by the USGSONGP. The presentation highlighted the need for a unified national standard in its promotion of a national LIDAR dataset that is gaining momentum in Washington. I worried a bit about the interests of an international audience, and got bogged down a bit in an alphabet soup of acronyms, but the need for the specification was also well covered to give an understanding of the policy and technology issues that are being debated.

ASPRS Presents Hot Topics

The ASPS Hot Topics session on the first morning of the event provided a good introduction about emerging areas of interest including, mobile LIDAR, data collection, high-performance computing for better performance, and training and education initiatives.

In the mobile session, we learned of the considerable expense of these systems, and also some of the paradigm-shifting possibilities from this technology. This introductory session was followed by a whole series of talks that delved into various applications of the technology.

Matt Bethel, the manager of systems engineering at Merrick and Company, provided a good overview of computer performance issues in the data-intensive LIDAR application space at the ILMF conference in Denver. Merrick has benchmarked a lot of different approaches in their need to increase throughput and decrease processing time for faster results. A good portion of investment is on the hardware/software side in a LIDAR shop, but time to process also factors in greatly to bottom-line costs in this process-centric industry.

Haiti Effort Benefits from LIDAR

Ken Hudnut of the U.S. Geological Survey discussed the use of LIDAR for both the Chilean and Haiti earthquakes at the ILMF event. Using the same scale, he showed the dramatic difference in size and shake pattern between these quakes. The Chilean fault size area was 60,000 sq km vs. 600 sq km in Haiti. He overlaid the PAGER product and combined with population centers, showing that the shaking patterns happened greatest in the densest areas in Haiti.

The Chilean earthquake was 500 times more energetic than in Haiti, although there were 300 times more deaths in Haiti, making it the sixth most lethal in recorded history. Given the level of deaths, the U.S. Geological Survey is studying Haiti in detail, with funding from USAID to understand what happened there, particularly since the global hazard map didn’t pinpoint the Haiti fault as a significant hazard area.

The LIDAR and imagery combination provides a means to quantify land changes, and to assess in the field when different land changes occurred. Feature offsets give a sense of the slip rate along the fault over time. LIDAR is tremendously powerful for the assessment of offset features to understand where damage occurred in the past.

The USGS will be doing an overall hazard map of the area, and LIDAR has been very helpful to assess damage, understand coastal deformation issues, and has enabled the determination of the location of the fault in areas where it wouldn’t be detectable before.

Fusion Points to New Possibilities

Monitoring Aids Environment Understanding

Related Blog Posts

• Continuing the Exploration of LIDAR Applications at #ILMF10
• Mobile Mapping Investment is Considerable
• High Performance Computing Aids LIDAR Work
• LIDAR for Earthquake Planning and Post-Event Assessments
• Fusion of Hyperspectral and LIDAR Yields More Realistic Urban Model for Simulation
• LIDAR is a Key Tool for the Measurement of Ecosystem Services