Topographic Laser Ranging and Scanning: Principles and Processing - Book Review

Reviewed by
Jason A. Tullis, Assistant Professor, Department of Geosciences, University of
Arkansas, Fayetteville, Arkansas

"Topographic Laser Ranging and Scanning: Principles and Processing targets a multidisciplinary environmental research audience with a detailed discussion of topographic lidar, including its history, technology, calibration, quality, and management as well as a variety of techniques for lidar-assisted information extraction. This book is organized into 19 chapters, with 29 contributors from academic, commercial, and governmental organizations in the United States, Finland, Canada, Germany, Australia, Austria, China, France, and the United Kingdom. A signifi cant number of grayscale fi gures, tables, and equations are complemented by chapter-level references, 12 color fi gures, an index, and a key to abbreviations. The 19 chapters are logically organized into four parts...."

more information and source: http://www.asprs.org/publications/pers/2009journal/october/review.pdf

Lidar Analysis in ArcGIS 9.3.1 for Forestry Applications

Great new tutorial! If you work with ArcGIS and LiDAR datasets, you must download this document!

http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/lidar-analysis-forestry.pdf

Global Mapper v11 free trial

You can download Global Mapper v11 free trial version.
Great software!

Link:

http://www.globalmapper.com/

MeshLab tutorials

hallo everybody,

here is a great blog about the opensource MeshLab software:

http://meshlabstuff.blogspot.com/

Mapping Ancient Civilization - New York Times

"For a quarter of a century, two archaeologists and their team slogged through wild tropical vegetation to investigate and map the remains of one of the largest Maya cities, in Central America. Slow, sweaty hacking with machetes seemed to be the only way to discover the breadth of an ancient urban landscape now hidden beneath a dense forest canopy...."



Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/science/11maya.html

Interesting article in NYTimes!

Spatial analysis of the Bronze Age sites of the region of Paphos in southwest Cyprus with the use of Geographical Information Systems - CAA

Surface analysis is also a very popular research area in GIS/Archaeology. I want to write more about Least-Cost Analysis in GIS later.

This work was mede by:
University of Cyprus, Archaeological Research Unit and Laboratory of Geophysical – Satellite Remote Sensing and Archaeo-environment, Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Foundation for Research and Technology




Part of Introcuction:

"The paper aims to study the Bronze Age site
distribution in the region of Paphos in SW Cyprus in
order to interpret site patterns. In the context of the
Paphos pilot project, entitled, “A long-term response
to the need to make modern development and the
preservation of the archaeo-cultural record mutually
compatible operations” (IACOVOU et al. 2009),
spatial analysis was performed, with the use of
Geographic Information Systems (GIS), on sites of
the Early, Middle and Late Cypriot period (3rd and
2nd millennium BC) that have been reported from
the region to this date...."

Underwater 3D shape reconstruction by fringe projection - CAA

Hallo everybody!

Sorry for the long time...

My second fovourite presentatiton was from CAA: "Underwater 3D shape reconstruction by fringe projection"
Great research at the University of Calabria, Italy (Bianco, G., Bruno, F., Muzzupappa, M., Luchi, M.L.).
Our Institute accomplished a big camera calibration project for underwater archaeological documentation, which was an interesting topic.


Part of Introcuction:

"....In this work, we have tested the effectiveness of a
whole-field structured light technique, based on
fringe projection, in underwater environment. The
Fringe Projection Technique (FPT) is widely used in
air (RASTOGI and GORTHI, 2010), and consists of
projection and acquisition of sinusoidal patterns on
the object (in the simplest case, one pattern is
enough). The system is composed by a video
projector and a digital camera, and the geometrical
setup is based on the principle of optical
triangulation. The recorded images are analyzed to
evaluate the phase-map of the object - which contains
the height information - with a signal processing
technique such as Fourier Transform (FT) , Wavelet
Transform (WT) , Windowed Fourier Transform
(WFT) , Spatial Phase Detection (SPD) or Phase
Stepping (PS). Any of these techniques of phase
measurement provides a discontinuous phase map of
the object (wrapped): so it becomes necessary to use
phase unwrapping in order to obtain a continuous
phase distribution (SURREL, 1998). By knowing the
intrinsic (focal distances, coordinates of the principal
points, and distortions) and extrinsic (relative
positions between the optical devises) parameters,
one can calculate the point clouds from the
triangulation between a optical ray of the camera (at
i,j pixel with phase value φi,j) and the relative plane
in the projector frame at the same phase value...."