The IQmulus high volume fusion and analysis platform for Geospatial Point Clouds, featuring a marine bathymetry use case

摘要

New data acquisition techniques are emerging and are providing a fast and efficient means for multidimensional spatial data collection. Single and multi-beam echo-sounders, airborne LIDAR, SAR satellites and mobile mapping systems are increasingly used for the digital reconstruction of the environment. All these systems provide point clouds, often enriched with other sensor data providing extremely high volumes of raw data. With these acquisition approaches, a great deal of data is collected, but it often requires harmonisation and integration before reaching its maximum use potential. Use cases include supporting numerical modelling on land such as simulations of flooding and drought, and for use in modelling waves and flow in seas and oceans. The IQmulus high volume fusion and analysis platform offers an architecture for processing such geospatial point clouds, through a set of pre-defined workflows, on a cloud infrastructure. Workflow elements include deconfliction of spatially overlapping data, spline interpolation to create high precision surfaces and the latest visualisation techniques for these datasets. Featured in the presentation is a workflow designed to process collections of surveys of water depth. Individual surveys vary both spatially and temporally and can overlap with many other similar surveys. Where measurements of water depth differ greatly between surveys a strategy needs to be employed to determine how to create an optimal bathymetric surface using all of the relevant, available data. As part of its SeaZone suite of data products, HR Wallingford employs the latest deconfliction techniques to produce such a ‘best’ surface. The workflow begins with a methodology for prioritising individual surveys, followed by spline interpolation of adjacent or overlapping datasets with a potentially parallel implementation which includes tiling and stitching to create the final completed surface. An example of how these datasets can support the immersive visualisation of civil engineering applications is shown through HR Wallingford's advanced Ship Simulation Centre.