Airborne Geiger-Mode LiDAR for Large-Scale, High-Resolution Wide-Area Mapping

This presentation describes a new solution for geospatial Geiger-mode Avalanche Photodiode (GmAPD) LiDAR – a suite of sensors, processing tools and analytics born from a 15-year GmAPD legacy within certain DoD environments that will bring a significant increase in production efficiency to the commercial market. The objective of the sensor design was to support USGS LiDAR Quality Level 1 (and higher) data production over large areas from pressurized, fixed-wing aircrafts flying at altitudes of between 4 km and 10 km AGL. Topics to be covered include: 1) why GmAPD sensing is a significant advance in LiDAR collection efficiency, 2) how the ITI-1000 GmAPD LiDAR sensor supports cost-effective, wide-area, high-density collection, with coverage rates much greater than 1,000 km2/hr, and 3) how a high-volume production system, including noise reduction and photogrammetric registration techniques, is designed to reduce the production time for the GmAPD 3D point clouds while increasing data accuracy.