BE Magazine - Volume 4, Issue 3 - (Page 49)

GEOSPATIAL MicroStation at the Heart of LiDAR Surveying Solutions Blom Aeroﬁlms meets the challenge posed by a growing need for rapid, accurate, and costeffective surveying and mapping to support GIS analysis and civil engineering design applications B “Since conventional surveying techniques were time-consuming and labor-intensive, our challenge was to ﬁnd a fast and efﬁcient solution,” Gaunt explained. “LiDAR met our needs exactly. Combined with digital photography, it enables us to map large areas of urban and rural landscapes in three dimensions. It also helps us to keep staff off the infrastructure corridor: working on motorway hard shoulders is highly dangerous and track possession whilst surveying rail infrastructure is costly and disruptive to schedules.” Blom Aeroﬁlms was v Eurocopter AS 350 B—TopEye Mk II system formed in 1919 as Aeroﬁlms, with Simmons Mapping being According to Chris Gaunt, business develformed in 1965 and acquiring Aeroﬁlms opment manager at Blom Aeroﬁlms, “We in 1997, becoming Simmons Aeroﬁlms in have a reputation as an innovative com2001. It is now part of the 1,000-strong pany. We actively embrace new and highly Oslo, Norway-based Blom Group. Said efﬁcient surveying techniques and techGaunt, “As part of the Blom Group, we nologies so that we can operate more quickly with fewer staff. That is why over seven years ago we took a strategic decision to adopt airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) as a core technology, supported by a full range of data processing services.” To do this, Blom Aeroﬁlms chose the MicroStation-based Terrasolid integrated software suite to process laser data points, adjust trajectories, create surface models of the ground, and to rectify images to orthorectiﬁed photographs. Some years ago, the company foresaw a growing need for rapid, accurate, and costeffective mapping to support GIS analysis v DTM of land slippage A66 Crackenthorpe and civil engineering design applications. lom Aeroﬁlms is the United Kingdom’s leading provider of aerial photography and digital map solutions for civil engineering design, environmental assessment, and land information management. have access to 22 aircraft and eight digital cameras, as well as ﬁxed wing and helicopter mounted scanners.” The company’s client list includes the Environment Agency, the Highways Agency and the national mapping agencies of the United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, and a number of Caribbean countries. How LiDAR works Both helicopter and ﬁxed-wing LiDAR systems scan the surface below the aircraft collecting considerable information on the terrain, achieving height accuracies up to 40 mm. Depending upon the system, the scan rates can vary from 50,000 to 100,000 pulses per second, producing a dense cloud of three-dimensional points. The resultant data is loaded into MicroStation and various Terrasolid modules are used to process the data, displaying the results in MicroStation. Every point captured is geo referenced and time stamped, and laser journey times are used to compute distances. Hamish Grierson is CAD manager at Blom Aeroﬁlms and is responsible for ensuring that the data processing technology delivers high-quality results on time and within budget. Outlining the process, Greirson said, “Typically, we split projects into areas of around 300 meters by 200 meters, each one of which contains around 1.5 to 2 million LiDAR points each. We classify the points as ground Volume 4, Issue 3 | BE MAGAZINE 49

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of BE Magazine - Volume 4, Issue 3

Contents Rising to the Challenge News BE Newsletter Highlights More ITS Sightings Racing Concrete Canoes Lights, Camera, Action! Making the Cut People’s Choice Awards 2007 Executive Keynotes Building Clear Vision of a Dream Concrete Results Reaching New Heights Building News From Bentley Golden KIWI Awards 2007 Civil A Coordination of National Highway Proportions Training Troops Beautifying Highways, One Sign at a Time Civil News From Bentley Geospatial Facility Facelift Planning for Uncertainty Geospatial News From Bentley MicroStation at the Heart of LiDAR Surveying Solutions Plant Making the Grade Data Deja Vu Data Clouds Provide Clear Visual of Underground Saving Precious-Metal Mining Time Plant News From Bentley Advertisers Index Special/Academic The Art of Visualization Training Is Key To Delivering State-of-the-Art Solutions Bridging the Information/Infrastructure Gap

BE Magazine - Volume 4, Issue 3

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