The first Lidar News issue of the year featured several interesting topics including multispectral Lidar and advances in handheld Lidar. Of particular interest to Civilmaps was the article titled “Accelerating Road and Pavement Condition Surveys” by Scott Mathison and Jean-Baptiste Lacambre.
The Federal Highway Administration has prepared data requirements for the US DOTs to produce. These requirements include data concerning the road (speed limits, route signage, etc.) and the pavement (International Roughness Index, Rutting, Faulting, Cracking, etc.). Since there are 4 million miles of public road in the US and most of it has to be scanned annually, that could lead to an estimated 40 petabytes of LiDAR data generated per year.
All of the roads in the US
An example of this type of contract is from the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) for scanning and labeling their road infrastructure. The bottleneck in producing these infrastructure reports is from the annotation and labeling of assets. It takes significant human intervention to process and verify the massive point cloud datasets gathered by mobile mapping vehicles.