A Survey on the Need for Airborne Lidar Training
نویسندگان
چکیده
Two questionnaires were sent out to over 600 members of the international lidar academic research and commercial mapping community, and a lidar research and training workshop was hosted in Halifax, Canada. The purpose of the questionnaires and the workshop was to better understand the status of, and needs for training within the lidar community. The results demonstrate that there is a clear need for training within both the end user and service provider sectors of the professional lidar community. It is speculated that although specific training needs differ, in terms of volume the end user community’s need is at least an order of magnitude greater than in the service provider sector. Regarding training priorities, there appears to be some clear stratification between the needs of end users and service providers. In general, practical experience and “hands on” training methods were considered more useful for those entering into lidar related employment, but this perception was not shared by academics. Also, results indicated that “end user applications” were the priority topic in the end user academic and government communities, while in the lidar industry, training priorities were related to more technical and operational topics such as “data processing” and “project management.” Within the lidar project workflow, six areas of responsibility were identified within the end user and service provider sectors (service provider operators, data processors, and project managers; and end user clients, project managers, and data processors), each of which having different training needs. The results of this study are being used by the Applied Geomatics Research Group to develop a suite of lidar training curricula from workshop seminars to industrysponsored project-based internship programs. Introduction During recent years, airborne laser scanning or lidar (light detection and ranging) has increasingly been demonstrated as a highly efficient method of data collection for a variety of high-resolution topographic (Flood and Gutelius, 1997), A Survey on the Need for Airborne Lidar Training Chris Hopkinson, Sorin Popescu, Martin Flood, and Robert Maher forest (Lim et al., 2003), wetland (Töyra et al., 2003), snowpack (Hopkinson et al., 2004), coastal (Webster et al., 2004), and other mapping applications. Consequently, the lidar mapping industry has grown to over 110 commercial sensors worldwide and is predicted to continue growing by approximately 15 percent per annum to over 190 sensors by 2010 (TMSI, 2005). However, the technology and manipulation of the data is still treated with caution, and even considered somewhat esoteric by many potential users. There is generally a low awareness of the applications and benefits of the technology, and potential users of lidar data often cannot differentiate the merits between lidar and competing technologies, such as IFSAR and traditional stereo photogrammetry (TMSI, 2005). There are several reasons why relatively new technologies are treated with caution, and in the case of lidar mapping, the potentially high costs and huge volumes of data involved, and significant investment in time required by the end user to derive the information required are certainly major factors. Another factor is the generally low profile of lidar technology and applications in mainstream mapping, remote sensing, and geomatics curriculum. The objective of this paper is to investigate the training needs for lidar technicians and professionals in both the service provision industry and the end user communities with the ultimate aim of using this information to develop appropriate training curricula to meet these needs. The specific questions discussed are: 1. What training is currently available? 2. Who needs lidar training? 3. What needs to be trained? 4. What format should training take? Methods Three primary data sources were used in conducting this study: results from two questionnaire distributions and a discussion forum hosted at the 1st Canadian Lidar Applied Research and Training (CLART) Workshop in Halifax, February 2005. Both questionnaires contained preliminary questions relating to the respondent’s personal profile, and respondents were allowed to provide comments on any topics throughout the questionnaires. The first questionnaire was distributed in mid-2004, and the preliminary results presented at a special lidar session during the annual meeting of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) in Denver (Popescu and Flood, unpublished PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEER ING & REMOTE SENS ING May 2007 537 Chris Hopkinson and Robert Maher are with Applied Geomatics Research Group, NSCC Annapolis Valley Campus, 50 Elliot Rd. Lawrencetown, NS BOS 1M0, Canada. C. Hopkinson is co-chair of the ASPRS Lidar Committee ([email protected]) Sorin Popescu is with the Department of Forest Science, Texas A&M University, 1500 Research Plaza, Suite B223, College Station, TX 77845. Martin Flood is with NIIRS10 (Canada), 57 Queen St. North, # 1111 Kitchener, ON N2H 6T7, Canada, and a member of the ASPRS Lidar Committee. Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing Vol. 73, No. 5, May 2007, pp. 537–546. 0099-1112/07/7305–0537/$3.00/0 © 2007 American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 05-103 8/6/07 6:25 PM Page 537
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