Airborne LiDAR Technology: A Review of Data Collection and Processing Systems

Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) has now become industry standard tool for collecting accurate and dense topographic data at very high speed. These data have found use in many applications and several new applications are being discovered regularly. This paper presents a review of the current state-of-the-art of this technology. The paper covers both data capture and data processing issues of the technology. The paper first discusses various types of LiDAR sensors and their working. This is followed by information on data format and data quality assessment procedures. The paper reviews the existing data classification techniques and also looks into the new approaches like convolutional neural networks and visual analytics for data processing. Finally, the paper outlines future scope of the technology and the research challenges, which should be addressed in coming years.