290095 PS Methodological Specialisation "Topographic Laser Remote Sensing" (2014W)

The availability and coverage of high-resolution and highly accurate 3D point clouds of the Earth surface, including the terrain surface as well as raised objects on the bare earth (e.g. trees and debris), has been increasing tremendously within the last decade. This trend can be attributed to decreasing costs of e.g. laser scanning flight campaigns and ground-based laser sensor systems, which have evolved into standard field equipment in environmental sciences and geosciences. Furthermore, the huge amount of data volume and the specific data structure of the acquired datasets (i.e. 3D point clouds) demands for new software tools for data processing and analysis for applications in geography. The lecture part gives an overview of applications in geography and related fields using different LiDAR data products (e.g. Digital Terrain Model and 3D point cloud), indicating a great variety of beneficial geo-applications. These applications range from visual interpretation of LiDAR derivatives (e.g. shaded relief map) to semi-automatic geomorphological mapping and fully automatic object detection (e.g. surface discontinuities). The lab and hands-on part of the course will give an introduction into terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) in theory and practice. By developing your own research question in small groups, you will learn to plan a TLS campaign, acquire the data in the field (one-day field trip) and to process the datasets in the lab. Particular focus is put on the analysis and geoinformation extraction of the acquired data to provide an empirical basis for the addressed research question (e.g. landslide monitoring, vegetation characterization). Video and interactive online impressions from a former course can be found here: http://lrg.geog.uni-heidelberg.de/hydrochange.