RIEGL VQ-1560 II, a state-of-the-art airborne LiDAR, helped RealWorld to analyze geologically hazardous areas in Taiwan.
For a relatively small island, Taiwan is incredibly mountainous. The reasons for this aren’t hard to understand — the island is located at the convergent boundary of the Philippine Sea Plate and the Eurasian Plate. The country has dramatic topography, and the climate varies from region to region. There are 268 high mountains over 3,000m in Taiwan, and in the low-altitude areas, there are dense subtropical jungles, both of which pose a challenge for airborne LiDAR surveying and mapping.
Real world, real challenges
RealWorld Surveying and Geomatics Corp. is the largest surveying and geographic information service provider in Taiwan. To expand and streamline the airborne surveying business, it established RealWorld Aviation Corp. in 2020. RealWorld uses the latest equipment and solutions, such as digital aerial mapping cameras, RIEGL airborne LiDAR, RIEGL mobile LiDAR, RIEGL terrestrial LiDAR, multibeam echo sounder, and other advanced equipment and software for aerial, land, and bathymetric surveying. The company is dedicated to high-accuracy data acquisition and provides Geographic Information System (GIS) platform development and analysis services to various government departments.
Taiwan has an active tectonic zone with active orogeny and is also prone to typhoons. Real- World has been using airborne LiDAR data to analyze geologically hazardous areas for more than ten years, but was facing weather, topography and other constraints.
State-of-the-art solution
While natural or geographic issues can’t be helped, the use of modern technology can assist in finding solutions. To overcome the challenges faced in surveying and mapping, RealWorld chose RIEGL VQ-1560 II, a state-of-the-art airborne LiDAR, which is suitable for working in high-altitude areas. The unique benefits of RIEGL VQ-1560 II include the large field of view (FOV), cross-fire scanning method, high pulse repetition rate (PRR), point cloud with high point density, and uniform distribution, which makes penetration in vegetation easy. These point clouds can be used in other applications, such as 3D city models, transportation, engineering, forestry, power industry, etc.
Since time and cost are the most critical factors for any project, the VQ-1560 II high-performance airborne LiDAR helped in overcoming these constraints — the scanning operations could be completed by only 40% of the flight lines compared to the previous sensor. This also improved the overall flight efficiency. In the past, the cost of an airborne LiDAR survey was about 30% to 40% of the entire project. Through high-efficiency scanning, it is expected that the spending will be reduced to 20% in the future, which will generate more profits, and give more time for data post-processing.
The VQ-1560 II also provides ease of use to the surveyors as it is lightweight and has hassle-free installation. The design of the operation interface is very intuitive and user-friendly. The post-processing software also provides corresponding accuracy reports, suitable for delivering the buyers’ exquisite and perfect deliverables.
Chi-Feng Wang, President, RealWorld Surveying and Geomatics Corp.
“High-efficiency scanning capability of VQ- 1560 II makes high definition LiDAR no longer exclusive to drones. Compared with drone’s take-off and landing, which is limited to high terrain relief in a mountainous area, a manned aircraft equipped with VQ-1560 II can be used to acquire large-scale high-density point clouds. Taiwan has built one-meter DTM data for the whole island. However, as the pioneers of surveying and mapping in Taiwan, we hope that we can compete with the world’s top surveying and mapping companies.”
Yang-Tse Huang, President, RealWorld Aviation Corp.
“RealWorld now has its aircraft, VQ-1560 II and many years of point cloud processing experience. We hope to introduce foreign experience in the use of high-density point clouds (HD LiDAR) in various fields in Taiwan, including power line inspection, smart cities, water conservancy, disaster prevention, etc. We hope that through the procurement of this high-performance instrument, we can once again promote the upgrade of airborne LiDAR specifications in the Taiwan surveying and mapping market.”
Seamless training and delivery
RIEGL delivered the VQ-1560 II in April 2020. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the RIEGL experts could not visit Taiwan to conduct installation and training. Therefore, Linkfast, the official distributor of RIEGL in Taiwan, established the hardware and software training plan according to the instrument delivery and airworthiness certification schedule. RIEGL systematically provided web training from theory and operation to data processing for hardware and software. Linkfast acted as the bridge of communication between RealWorld and RIEGL to ensure seamless training and delivery.
