Down to Earth: Point Clouds to Paradise – Episode 3

So we're back here in the office now. We wrapped up day two successfully. We were able to complete the third of the final three missions at the north end of the property from the South Florida Water Management District Canal, back into our heavily vegetated north end. When we got back to the office yesterday, we unloaded our truck. We were able to bring in all of our batteries recharge our laser and drone batteries. We then compiled all of our laser data on the USB along with our ground control off of our data collector, and then we can import those into our SSD on our processing machine, where we can then begin importing all of the cycles directly into G o q l p three sixty. So what we're gonna do today is we're gonna upload everything into l p three sixty. We're going make sure that all of our files are correct and the accurate measurements are there. We're going to load our GCPs and then deliver the files to our project managers. Well, now that we're back at the office, we have plugged in our USB drive into our computer. And we will begin transferring our files. So as you can see here, the bottom two thirds is day one. So we started here at the very south end. We moved further north to the middle of the project. And then on day two, we completed the northern third up here next to the adjacent canal and highway right of ways. Once we begin importing all of these Cycles will be able to begin processing them individually, and we will work, like I mentioned, from left to right, starting with Postpack processing, We will then analyze and create our flight lines. We'll be able to turn those flight lines into true view trajectories. And then last but not least, we'll be able to geocode the lidar, which gives us this beautiful RGB LAS point cloud that you see here on the screen. The left and right in two d and three d. As you can see here, we have all of our individual cycles here. Once we have completed processing from left to right through POSpact, flight lines and geocoding the lidar of each individual cycle, we will then combine all of those LAS's into one single LAS So what you can see here is I turn this on, we now have a one single LAS file of the entire project. Now that we have pleated the classification and quality control process. We are ready to move on to the deliverable phase. What we wanna do is take our lidar point cloud, and we are going to extract a contour surface. So LP three sixty makes this extremely easy. It can go ahead and do a couple hundred acres in a minute or two. Alrighty folks. Now that we have x ported our surface. What we'll do is we will bring that surface over to CAD and import it What you see here is the imported surface from LP three sixty in AutoCAD civil three d. Zooming in here in CAD, we can see we've got some pyramiding that may or may not be accurate. We can verify that this is incorrect by hovering over this outside area. And getting an elevation of fifteen feet and we can check inside the elevation, fifty seven feet. We don't have any ground that's fifty seven feet, so we know this is vegetation needs to be unclassified. And then what we'll do is go back to LP three sixty and zoom in to that area. So we'll draw a profile across that area compass the whole piece. And as you can see here on the two d profile view in the bottom window, we've got a point way up high in here here. And we'll use these two tools here which is classify points above the line and we will draw in a line and you'll see that as I draw that line, that little point down there turns from yellow to white. That means it's been activated. We have our line, we'll hit space bar, and that activates that point to become created, never classified again. And it disappears. As you can see up here, our pyramiding has also disappeared up here. And we'll do the same thing across the entire project going through looking through looking for inconsistencies between CAD and LP three sixty. Once we are satisfied with quality of our surface and then we'll be ready to import our ortho mosaic for placement underneath our surface. So we'll import it and you'll see it snaps right to where it's supposed to be and click okay. And then all we need to do is just send our ortho mosaic to the back and then here you can see your surface on top of your ortho mosaic and you'll want to do a little more quality control and just make sure that your contour lines match up with what you're seeing in the ortho Jose. So and once we have everything in CAD, we're ready to save our entire project and pass it off to our project manager. In conclusion, this is what we will end up with as a final deliverable and as you can see we were able to generate an extremely high definition ortho mosaic photo which allows you to zoom in and almost read someone's license plate from two hundred defeat in the air. It's pretty good. And then in addition to the ortho photo, we were able to generate a ground surface LAS point cloud that contained upwards of seventy million points across some six or seven hundred acres, which is just almost infinitely more than you would ever be able to gather with a traditional GPS field crew in a fraction of the time. To do a heavily densely vegetated area with marsh wetlands would take weeks with a traditional field crew or multiple field crews. Whereas, in comparison, our UAS operations department was able to use the TrueView six thirty five in conjunction with LP three sixty to complete a six hundred to seven hundred acre topographic survey in a matter of two to three days, including planning, operations, processing and deliverables.