West Virginia - Preliminary Information

As we finish the final products for the bridge we collected a couple weeks ago, I want to share some of the preliminary information.  As mentioned in the posting titled "On the Water with the Baker Navy", we performed a collection with the unit on a barge (SBET shown below in blue) and a collection from the vehicle (SBET shown below in red).  Since we utilized the same GPS base, the collections were seamlessly integrated and adjusted.

We exported both SBET's to a Google Earth KMZ file to visualize the vehicle trajectory. An interesting feature of Google Earth is the Elevation Profile tool.  The below image shows the land collection SBET and elevation profile.  The profile pulls the Z value from the KMZ file - rather than clamping the information to the ground.  Notice that our Mobile LiDAR crew made 4 passes over the bridge.  The position of the red arrow represents the vertical line in the profile - showing elevation, slope and distance from start along the drive.

Next, the preliminary LAS data was processed.  The two images below show the intensity values from the LAS data from both collections.  No adjustment was performed up to this point.

Since this is unadjusted LAS data, there is "noise" in the data due to inaccuracies in the SBET - primarily caused by loss of GPS. Using the ground control established using the Trimble S6 reflectorless total station we carry on-board the vehicle, the point cloud was adjusted to be coincident and to meet the localized coordinate system for the project.