Airbone and terrestrial laser scanning (Lidar) are well established methods for the collection of reliable 3D geoinformation by processing and analysis of point clouds. More recently, mobile laser scanning systems which integrate terrestrial Lidar with position and orientation systems on a mobile platform complete the Lidar system developments.

The tutorial will review the Lidar applications which started more than a decade ago with digital terrain model generation. Nowadays, a variety of area mapping and corridor mapping applications in cities and forests, along roads, rivers or costal lines, for rail road, transmission lines or general infrastructure are carried out using laser scanning. On processing Lidar we start with the working principle of lasers and look at automatic registration techniques for merging point clouds of different strips, tracks or scans from different viewpoints. Despite large differences in resolution and accuracy between airbone and terrestrial laser scanner data, the research problems like feature extraction and 3D modelling are very similar. We will rewiew point cloud filtering, segmentation, 3D modelling tasks and landscape analysis.

Data from airbone and mobile Lidar are available to get in touch with the point clouds and gain practical experience. We will investigate the data in 3D to understand the information content given by the point clouds, filter ground and non ground objects, detect and extract vegetation regions, look at the limits of Lidar recordings and see how products like terrain models and building models are generated and reconstructed.