Airborne LiDAR: state-of-the-art of system design, technology and application

Abstract

In the last two decades, airborne LiDAR, as an active remote sensing technique, has emerged as one of the most effective and reliable means of 3D point clouds collection. This paper presents a survey of the literature related to these techniques, emphasizing state-of-art trends in system design as well as data processing techniques and their impact on various applications. With the challenging requirements of airborne surveying and mapping, the novel LiDAR system design appears to improve data collection ability and derived product resolution/accuracy. Based on a full range of spectral, spatial and temporal properties of the data obtained, recently proposed methods and techniques are presented here to instigate further possibilities for land and urban topography, forest and bathymetric surveying. The conclusion discusses possible developments for more advanced high performance airborne LiDAR systems, allowing spectral detection and geometrical extraction for improved understanding of urban infrastructure planning and natural resource management.

A Survey on Ground Segmentation Methods for Automotive LiDAR Sensors

“…Its output is a 3D point cloud that can be used for terrain mapping and recreating the surrounding environment. Thus, this technology has become widely popular in several airborne laser scanning (ALS) applications, such as archaeology [ 9 , 10 , 11 ], geology [ 12 ], forestry [ 13 , 14 ], geography and topography [ 14 , 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ], surveying [ 14 ], laser altimetry [ 19 ], and many more [ 14 ]. Due to its wide success in such domains, LiDAR sensors recently started to be adopted by the automotive industry in the perception system of the car.…”

A low‐drift and real‐time localisation and mapping method for handheld hemispherical view LiDAR‐IMU integration system

“…MLS can be further subdivided depending on the platforms. Airborne laser scanning technology supports the rapid acquisition of surface information for constructing the digital elevation model (DEM) or digital surface model (DSM) (Li et al, 2020). Vehicle laser scanning adopts the mobile measuring vehicle as the platform to collect spatial location data and attribute information (Tao & Li, 2007).…”

Semi-analytical Monte Carlo simulation of lidar underwater target

“…Since 1960s, the first set of ocean LIDAR system was introduced, because it can obtain the vertical profile information of the ocean, ocean LIDAR has been a lot of research worldwide, of which the typical application is Airborne LIDAR bathymetry 1 . As the Airborne LIDAR bathymetry can be carried on the manned aircraft flight platform work (200-500m flight altitude), so compared with the sonar-based shipboard mapping can be both efficient and safe to complete the highprecision three-dimensional seabed topography mapping, near-coastal environmental monitoring, port construction, island mapping, and maintenance of marine ecosystems and other aspects [2][3][4] . In addition, airborne bathymetric lidar can also receive laser echoes from underwater targets, and thus has the application prospect of underwater target detection.…”