As Peter Slovinsky from the Maine Geological Survey points out in this well written article the agency has been fortunate to have been able to fund a number of LiDAR projects for the same areas in multiple years. One of these is Goochs Beach a 1.3 km long east-west trending pocket barrier located adjacent to the mouth of the Kennebunk River and bounded by bedrock headlands of Oaks Neck and Old Fort Point.

By comparing the digital elevation models from different years Peter and his team have been able to assess whether the dunes have been eroding or accreting, and whether they have been moving as a result of wave action during major storms. The article discusses the methodology as well as the results to date.

As Peter points out the data represents a point in time and depending on when the flight occurred could include bias as the processes are continuous and there are seasonal biases.

On a somewhat related note the ASTM E57.04 Data Interoperability standard was balloted today. You must be a member of the committee to vote. It is going to be very interesting to see what the committee thinks. Stay tuned.

A second important article in this month’s PE & RS journal comes from Lewis Graham at GeoCue Corporation. In Mobile Mapping Systems Overview Lewis provides a basic introduction to the hardware technology, and highlights the key steps in the data collection and processing workflows.

Lewis is a key member of the recently formed ASPRS Mobile Mapping System – MMS committee, which will have its first meeting at the ASPRS Annual Conference in San Diego, CA April 26 – 30, 2010. If you are interested in participating please contact Lewis via lgraham@geocue.com. This group will certainly play a key role in the development of best practices and standards for this rapidly emerging technology.

I just noticed that this is my 300th blog post. Many thanks to all of you for your interest, comments and ongoing support.

Jason Stoker, who is the Director of USGS’s CLICK – Center for LiDAR Information Coordination and Knowledge is the author of an important research paper that has just been published in the March 2010 PE&RS Journal. As this is not a peer reviewed article it is open to the public.

Jason and his team are conducting research on the use of lidar-derived data, such as elevation or slope, to create more visually informative, and “imagery friendly” data formats. If you are used to working with multi- or hyperspectral imagery than the approach will be familiar to you. If not, it will take some time to understand how the data can be combined with the 3 primary colors RGB – red, green and blue to produce what Jason refers to as LiDAR band combinations.

In the end the potential benefits of this approach include the ability to take advantage of well established image processing and classification methods for analyzing the data, as well as the general improvement derived from better visual understanding of the information.

Jason is requesting that people experiment with this approach and provide him with your feedback.

Kenny spends a significant amount of time discussing the issues surrounding hydro breaklines, which as Karl Heidemann from the USGS pointed out last week are critical to the development of accurate digital terrain models.

Medical researchers at UC Irvine’s Beckman Laser Scanning Institute believe they have developed optical, metabolic signatures for malignant breast tumors. As my wife just finished a 5 year treatment for a pre-cancerous tissue this was all too familiar a discussion.

The researchers believe that the potential is there to identify breast tumors in dense tissue that are often not identified with traditional mammography. In certain cases contrast agents are needed and even then can be problematic in diagnosing tumors in young women where if present are particularly aggressive.

The technique can also be used during treatment to measure the effectiveness of the procedures. A larger research test suite is being planned.