An Object-oriented Software Development Approach to Design Simulator for Airborne Altimetric Lidar

Topographic data are fundamental for several applications. The latest technique for topographic data collection is Airborne Altimetric LiDAR. However, LiDAR data is not available for research and education as required. This paper describes the object oriented design methods used to develop a software system to simulate the functioning of an airborne altimetric LiDAR instrument. Our objective is to model functions of a LiDAR instrument by using object oriented software development approach so that the developed software could be maintainable, reliable and scalable. The object-oriented software development processes, viz., object–oriented analysis, objectoriented design and object-oriented programming have been done to realize the software. The simulator is conceived with three components, namely terrain component, sensor component and trajectory component. Each component has been divided into their sub modules and designed independently. The terrain component deals with generation of bare terrain and objects on top of the terrain. The sensor component deals with design of commercially available sensors or a generic sensor. And the trajectory component deals with modelling of platform parameters, viz., velocity, roll, pitch, yaw and accelerations. Numerical methods are used to solve complex problems for generating LiDAR data from simulated terrain and flights. LiDAR data files are generally very large. Considering this, special data structures and file formats have been designed to improve the performance and to solve the memory problems. This user friendly GUI based simulator, developed in JAVA programming language, is an ideal tool for research and education.