Two New Documents Available for Public Use
As part of its mission, ASPRS maintains a leadership role in the development of guidelines, standards, specifications, and calibration processes for those sensors and activities of primary importance to the membership by using established procedures for developing, reviewing, modifying, approving standards, and publishing them.
A USGS-ASPRS Work Group (WG), operating under the aegis of the ASPRS Lidar Division and the Airborne Lidar Committee, has investigated various factors associated with the geometric quality of lidar data. The WG has noted that while the quality of lidar data have improved tremendously in the past few years, the QA/QC of these data are not standardized, including the semantics, processes for measurement and reporting, and meta data. Therefore, to ensure the geometric quality of that lidar data required for scientific (statistical error propagation and estimation) and non-scientific purposes (including legal), the WG has recommended several topics for research and development in a Summary document. In addition, the WG created Guidelines on quantifying the relative horizontal and vertical errors observed between conjugate features in the overlapping regions of lidar data. The effort has been supported by the USGS National Geospatial Program (NGP) and the Land Remote Sensing (LRS) program.
At the ASPRS Imaging & Geospatial Technology Forum (IGTF) in Baltimore, MD in March, 2017, the Standards Committee implemented the first phase of an outreach campaign by approving draft versions of “Summary of Research and Development Efforts Necessary for Assuring Geometric Quality of Lidar Data” and “Guidelines on Geometric Inter-Swath Accuracy and Quality of Lidar Data” and releasing them for review by the ASPRS membership.
Industry stakeholders and the general public participated and the documents are up for approval by the ASPRS Board of Directors on February 4, 2018 at our conference in Denver. Please spread the word about this new important milestone for the industry. Please send any accolades to lidar-guidelines@asprs.org.
Summary of Research and Development Efforts Necessary for Assuring Geometric Quality of Lidar Data (draft version)
Summary of Research and Development Efforts Necessary for Assuring Geometric Quality of Lidar Data (final version)
Guidelines on Geometric Inter-Swath Accuracy and Quality of Lidar Data (draft version)
Guidelines on Geometric Inter-Swath Accuracy and Quality of Lidar Data (final version)