Collaborative Proposal: Making Point Clouds Useful for Earth Science

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This collaborative project between Idaho State University (ISU), Utah State University (USU), and USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station (RMRS) will develop the next generation of analytical and processing tools for new airborne and ground-based LiDAR monitoring data. The tools will help earth scientists and natural resource managers exploit these data streams to address some of our most pressing environmental questions and management challenges. The software tools will target Earth Science-specific analysis of 3-D point cloud data from platforms like airborne LiDAR (ALS), ground-based LiDAR (TLS), multi-beam SONAR (MBS), and/or Structure from Motion (SfM). The tool development will scale-up existing documented and proven algorithms to be more accessible, as well as build new algorithms that are necessary to address emerging challenges such as change detection analysis from repeat surveys, improved bare earth surface generation, and novel fusion of point clouds collected from different platforms (e.g. ALS and TLS). The new software will be developed collaboratively between geoscientists and computer scientists to optimize performance when handling the large and often problematic data volumes associated with point clouds. This work will provide a suite of community software that will permit innovative and potentially transformative data analysis with the potential to enhance our understanding of numerous earth surface processes.