An overview to the applications of airborne lidar systems
Due to emerging need of the industries to rapid, accurate and cost effective geospatial data acquisition systems, diverse varieties of sensors have been developed. For this purpose, airborne Lidar systems are one of the recently developed sensors which provide direct acquisition of 3D position of geospatial objects. During the past decade, vast research activates are carried out in different application of airborne Lidar systems. From the other side, other sensors like multispectral sensors, radar, photographic sensors provide valuable geospatial information. So there is a need of comparing Lidar with other sensors by giving an overview to its applications and analyzing the advantages or disadvantages of using lidar in different areas.
In this paper, different application of Lidar and also the implemented methods used in each application are discussed. Major Lidar applications could be summarized as: 1) Forestry: DTM generation in forested areas and study of drainage patterns, vegetation parameter estimation, tree height and diameter, biomass estimation; 2) Rural and urban modeling and change detection: extraction of roads, railway tracks, energy lines, polyhedral building extraction, 3-D city modeling, rapid mapping of the damage after natural disasters, DTM generation and volume calculation in open pit mines; 3) Photogrammetry: successful alignment/absolute orientation of the photogrammetric images, cartographic updating of urban areas; 4) Ocean and hydrography: dunes and tidal flats measurement, coastal change and erosion, flood mapping and prediction, snow and ice measurement, water bathymetry in depths up to 70 m.
Airborne lidar systems are rapidly developing and expanding in new applications. Perhaps potential integration o Lidar with imaging sensors, efficient using of waveform information and better processing algorithms would make a great development in obtaining more realistic and accurate 3D models of the geospatial objects. Maybe in future, more cost effective solutions would attract the users to suite from this technology.