Johannes Riegl Jr

LEADERS' OUTLOOK

ANNUAL EDITION / JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022

Enhancing LiDAR Performance for Better Data Collection

BY JOHANNES RIEGL JR.

President, Riegl USA Inc. & Riegl International GmbH of almost all physical applications and processes.

Today, LiDAR is being used in a variety of applications and as a leading provider of 3D laser scanners, RIEGL is convinced that excellent results can be achieved by combining top quality data with best-in-class software solutions. The company is committed to making it as easy as possible to access datasets like point clouds, oriented imagery, and trajectories.

Broad performance features

RIEGL’s Ultimate LiDAR™ 3D scanners offer a wide array of performance characteristics and serve as a platform for continuing innovation in 3D for the LiDAR industry. The principal advantage ofscanning tools and technologiesis their inherent 3D quality and the added morphological value that such data provides.3D spatial data, derived spatial statistics and relevant 3D map products are now becoming an integral part of our interconnected reality and decision support systems. We fully expect these technologies to become embedded components

Data integrity is critical to historic and/or recurring analysis to ensure reliable and consistent results.RIEGL contributes by providing inputs to various committees and organizations focused on these topics (for example, MAPPS). We also provide a manufacturer’s perspective on how to maximize data quality and implement best practices to ensure users are empowered to deliver the best available raw data for subsequent analysis.

Emerging technologies and prospects

New technologies such as machine learning (ML) or deep

Technology improvements and new software solutions in the next few years will result in better performance by LiDAR sensors.

learning (DL) are boosting point cloud classification and feature extraction.This has the advantage of easier adoption of changed requirements, which may well affect software product life cycles on one hand and open up new applications for LiDAR on the other. Today, ML and DL applications require massive computing power and are likely to require this in the near future too, which, in most cases, can only be addressed by Cloud processing. It is the Cloud environment that enables the creation of new business models for service providers.

RIEGL’s new US headquarters in Florida serve the North American customer base and have been built with future growth in mind, to provide state-of-the-art sales, service, support, training, and calibration facilities to RIEGL customers. At the company’s global headquarters in Horn, Austria, an additional manufacturing facility has nearly doubled the available production space. And finally, the company’s international regional office network, with RIEGL offices in Australia, Hong Kong, China, Japan, and Canada, has been expanded by opening a new regional office in the United Kingdom. It is apparent that RIEGL is innovating for the future and creating lasting infrastructure within the geospatial community.

What the future holds

Technology improvements in the next three to fiveyears will result in increased performance by LiDAR sensors with respect to speed and overall accuracy, which means more data will be collected in shorter amounts of time. In addition, instruments will become more compact and lightweight for further integration with additional sensors. We expect sensor fusion to gain momentum, with a variety of optical sensors entering the market.