Efficient Modeling of Large-Scale LIDAR Date

Softree Technical Systems Inc has been providing innovative software solutions for surveying, mapping and engineering for more than 15 years. Softree's main mission is to provide high quality software applications in land development, civil engineering and the naturalresource industries. Recently, the company has developed a robust software to process the terrain data gathered from a LIDAR system. The main objective of the application is to provide the user with the ability to draw, label, manipulate, and extract some features of the terrain. As the technology of LIDAR data acquistion advances and also due to increased user demands, there is now the need to process and interact with very large amounts of geometry data. This is the main challenge we wish to address in this project. Although efficient processing of large-scale geometry using out-of-core modeling techniques, level-of-details or multi-resolution modeling, and applications supported by Softree offer particular new problem settings which would require more careful examinations and research into existing techniques and also development of new techniques to adapt to the user needs. In this project, we wish to develop a software system consisting of efficient out-of-core and Level of Detail (LOD) techniques to allow Softree to handle large-scale LIDAR data, datasets exceeding 100 million points. Algorithms for specific tasks relevant to Softree such as draping of road cross sections,volume differencing, and interactive model or road profile visualization will be developed.

Faculty Supervisor:

Dr. Richard Zhang

Student:

Nima Aghdaii

Partner:

Softree Technical Systems Inc.

Discipline:

Computer science

Sector:

Information and communications technologies

University:

Simon Fraser University