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Local firm uses digital photography, LiDAR

Geographic survey maps for municipal planning or for building a strip of new provincial highway used to take up to two years to complete.

When the Emergency Measures Organization called a local aerial surveying company and wanted maps of the flooding St. John River in the spring of 2008, the EMO had the first maps in its hands within 48 hours.

The neophyte Leading Edge Geomatics was the company that did the aerial surveying throughout the crisis, mapping and providing the government agency with a clear picture of how extensive the flooding was.

"As the flooding was happening, we were out there mapping out the high water mark," said company president and general manager Bill Kidman

When the Lincoln Road geomatics company started in 2007 it had timing on its side.

The traditional film photography used in aerial surveying was on its way out, being replaced by digital cameras. So the start-up company skipped right to the digital equipment and didn't invest anything in film cameras.

High resolution digital cameras produce far more detailed maps than film cameras. And with the easy transposition of digital imagery onto computers and into mapping software programs, it has put the young company far ahead of what was possible with the old technologies.

But Leading Edge put itself even further ahead of the curve investing in another new technology, even more recent than digitalized photography.

LiDAR - for Light Detection and Ranging - is leading-edge technology that uses light-sensitive lasers to map out images of the ground. Few if any other surveying companies are using it here.

"It's been around for 10 years but it is just starting to gain acceptance in the commercial market now," said Kidman.

A former soldier, Kidman was introduced to LiDAR aerial surveying during his final years of a 20-year career with the military.

Leading Edge owns its own Cessna 260 airplane and has an on-staff pilot, and access to other aircraft when needed.

As the Cessna flies high above the subject area, from a 20-inch hole in the floor, a digital camera or the LiDAR equipment, or both, is firing rapidly, capturing image after image. Meanwhile all of those images and data are being fed into an on-board computer.

The company continues to do photography but increasingly customers are requesting the LiDAR product, said Kidman.

To anyone familiar with Google Earth maps, the photographed survey maps will look similar to those images. But the LiDAR equipment produces something quite different.

The company's LiDAR team leader Duncan Allen flashes up on his computer mapping done for Sydney, N.S. The staff used a combination of photography and LiDAR.

The LiDAR image of bright streams of red, yellow, blues and greens, flowing across the screen, looks like a piece of modern art. All of the trees, hills and buildings are stripped away because the laser can pierce through most things to capture the bare earth.

Using highly sophisticated mapping software, Allen then superimposes information from the digitalized photographs on top of the LiDAR image. Now the trees, streets, roads and buildings appear.

"This is all the elevation information for all the trees and all the buildings. It is taking this flat imagery and draping it right on top of the LiDAR and now you are seeing elevation-coded imagery," explained Allen.

The maps are so detailed you can see power lines and the lines of a parking lot.

"That's how sensitive this equipment (the LiDAR) is, it can tell if it is hitting paint or hitting the asphalt," said Allen.

These images were shot from an altitude of 1,600 feet but they can captures images from as high as 10,000 feet, said Kidman.

Among the advantages of the LiDAR, said Kidman, is the computer can read its data much more easily than from photographic images. Another is the laser can penetrate a tree canopy or anything light can pass through, to give more accurate measurements of a target area.

In its short life Leading Edge has grown from one employee - just Kidman - to 12. It has mapped some 23,000 square kilometres in the four Atlantic provinces, 40 ports in the United States, taken on big projects in Ontario and done work for engineering firms, municipal, provincial and federal governments and the Department of National Defence.

Kidman is most proud of the fact that the company has been able to provide such advanced technology to some small places, like Sussex and Summerside, P.E.I., places where larger companies would not go.

Kidman doesn't like to boast but this kind of geographic mapping and quality data provided by his small company is comparable to the work done by organizations like the massive U.S. National Oceanic Atmospheric Agency.

"This is a response capability pretty much the limit of what anybody could achieve," said Kidman.

So what's next for Leading Edge Geomatics? Australia.

The firm has a contract with a company there and expects to have staff in place by April.

Forward Thinking is a Thursday feature that explores research and development, as well as new technologies in our community. Send your comments and story ideas to news@dailygleaner.com.