One of the more interesting areas of development right now for laser radar are "waveform" LIDAR systems. Unlike Linear-mode (Lm) or Geiger-mode (Gm) system that collect a relatively small number of height measurements per GSD, a "waveform" LIDAR (wLIDAR) essentially digitizes the returned flux during the time window at some time resolution. That means you have intensity information at all the ranges rather than just a discrete set of them. This allows for some very complex post-processing of the data. The "Airborne Taxonomic Mapping System" (AToMS) operated by the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO) is being used to better quantify the biomass in complex tree canopies and grasslands. The remote sensing arm of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) plans on operating a wLIDAR on it's Airborne Observation Platform (AOP). Most wLIDAR systems feature a high performance, single-pixel detector coupled to a high performance digitizer. To ob...
A blog about the Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Image Generation (DIRSIG) model featuring posts contributed by the developers. This is not a user manual and it is not a training class. But, it is a place to see what the developers are doing and a little about how we do it. So think of this as a place to learn cool tips, tricks, etc.