Building Urban Databases with SAIC Toolkit

But building high-resolution urban databases to support these activities has always been cost-prohibitive, with users opting for traditional single-purpose paper maps.

However, with advances in Light Detection And Ranging (LIDAR) collection systems, combined with SAIC's proprietary LIDAR Toolkit, this is no longer the case. (Similar to RADAR, LIDAR uses laser pulses instead of radiowaves. Its data is often collected by government and commercial sources from aircraft flying at altitudes of 4,000 to 12,000 feet with LIDAR sensors.)

In fact, our LIDAR toolkit greatly reduces data processing costs. For example, we can use LIDAR data to create a digital elevation model with vertical accuracies within 15 centimeters. Although the raw elevation model provides excellent 3D visualizations, most analyst tools require a "bare earth" model, devoid of trees and man-made structures. Now, with the LIDAR Toolkit, we can extract this bare-earth model in a fraction of the time of past labor-intensive methods.

In the last six months alone, our SAIC LIDAR team has processed more than 20,000 square kilometers (12,400 square miles) of data extracting millions of buildings in dozens of cities from LIDAR data. The LIDAR Toolkit allows SAIC to extract buildings for nearly one-tenth of the cost of traditional techniques, making urban database development affordable for local, commercial, and federal users.

In addition, the LIDAR Toolkit's capabilities were expanded under an SAIC independent research and development program to encompass a broad range of applications. This includes fully automated tools for plotting hydrography and analyzing watersheds, characterizing vegetation, and detecting power lines, as well as protecting airport departure and arrival corridors. In fact, the LIDAR Toolkit has been used successfully in virtually every major political and sporting event in the last three years.

Currently, our LIDAR team is researching new LIDAR techniques that will extract even higher resolution features and allow the toolkit to automatically process datasets of entire countries.

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