Speakers Bio & Abstract

Abstract Vehicle Mounted SurveysThe introduction of technologies such as mobile laser scanners and advanced imaging systems have opened a new world of applications for the generation of geospatial data through vehicle mounted surveys. Vehicle mounted surveys allow for safer and more efficient data collection in a whole range of environments. From built up city scapes, to open highways and rail corridors. Vehicles can cover a much larger area than other ground based techniques and presents a much safer option than having people on foot in these areas. Rather than capturing individual points and being focussed on specific features of interest, these systems capture details of nearly everything on site, meaning the data can be re-used again for other applications without needing to revisit the area. The presentation will outline, via examples from around the Asia region, the benefits of vehicle mounted surveys for data capture. While this new paradigm in data capture offers great advantages from the perspectives of safety, access for data capture and speed of data capture, it also presents a set of new challenges to contend with. Almost every new system is capable of measuring more points per second and more megapixels per image. The trade-off for this extra detail is data storage and management. Modern systems can collect hundreds of gigabytes (or even terabytes of data depending on the settings!) in a single day. Processing, storing and sharing data of this size amongst stakeholders can be a challenging task. Cloud platforms offer some solutions to this problem. Storage space and even computing power are no longer an issue, by virtue of harnessing cloud infrastructure. With cloud based solutions data can easily be shared with anyone who has an internet connection, regardless of their location in the world. The power of GIS can also be added to the data and cloud platform, along with integration to other systems, e.g. asset management tools. This allows the vehicle mounted survey data to be utilised by a much larger audience (ie beyond just GIS professionals) thereby providing a much greater return on the data capture investment. Cloud based Geospatial platforms such as GEOCIRRUS are now being used in this regard. Examples of the GEOCIRRUS Mobile Mapping solution will be provided in the presentation. Most end users also do not have the capacity to use raw point cloud data in their applications, resulting in a need for extraction of features to produce a simpler dataset. This can be a time consuming and labour intensive task which paves the way for the development and introduction of semi-automated and fully-automated techniques. This is still a rapidly development area of mobile mapping and current users must consider factors of both time and accuracy when deciding between