During some recent winter testing Airborne installed a LiDAR and Digital camera in a dual-port Piper Navajo to put Lidar and Photogrammetry to a head-to-head test. As one of the only companies in North America who has aircraft capable of hosting two large format sensors simultaneously, we decided to see what the LIDAR vs MULTI RAY PHOTOGRAMETRY debate was all about first handed.
Some preliminary observations: While in vegetated areas LiDAR appears to render the “bare earth” surface better than photogrammetric Digital Surface Modelling (DSM), on hard surfaces we only see 1.5 pixel RMS difference (at this scale approximately 6 cm), when comparing DSM and LiDAR surfaces. While both surfaces performed with similar accuracy characteristics, the traditionally compiled Photogrammetric product still gives the best representation of the terrain when considering feature such as curbs and high-slope hard surfaces.
Putting aside the bundling up in big winter jackets for the cold flights, it was a great adventure and awesome opportunity to get real data to shed light on the performance of these technologies.
