Improve LIDAR data storage, quality and performance

Improve LIDAR data storage, quality and performance
The evolution of LIDAR data from file system to very large database

The presentation demonstrates a new and quick approach how to evolve LIDAR data storage delivery for analyses, visualization and object recognition improving quality and security. The solution is in action on customer site with more than 10TB of data (8 billion points) and less than 3 minutes response time for more than 15 million points.

Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) produces vast amounts of data, which must be efficiently stored, processed and retrieved – accompanied by the data lifecycle management including metadata. Conventional methods mostly use file systems for storage resulting in a lack of data management
and performance bottlenecks.

The main focus of this paper is ease of management, performance, provisioning, quality assurance and data security associated with spatial data. The solution is technically based on the “Oracle® Spatial” database product, which is used to store and retrieve spatial data.

The data resulting from ALS missions and their descriptive ISO compliant metadata are accumulated in a XML capable database and published by Catalogue Service (CSW) for disposal to processing.

Processing the ALS data files leads to structured, geo-referenced and classified point clouds. Aerial images – ditto stored in database georaster objects. Serve as base for extracting color information to enrich the point cloud data.

Due to its efficiency and transparency, this database is especially suitable to serve 3D-visualizations, analysis algorithms and object recognition processes interaction on SQL.

A graphical client tool supporting spatial and relational retrievals of the stored contents will be presented too.