Aerial photos don’t hack it anymore

— filed under: News, Print Edition

For more than 70 years, overlapped, vertical down aerial photographs, viewed in 3D, provided the best basis for determining what the surface of the Earth really looked like.

But lasers, ground penetrating radar and lasers have changed all that.

Earlier this month I visited Owen Parfray, a Melbourne based geologist/computer programmer, who writes software to interpret massive volumes of zeroes and ones, to form useful geographic information system (GIS) material.

He works for PBBI Natural Resources (formerly Encom) which is part of Pitney Bowes, a US company which I had only previously associated with office equipment.

He said aeroplanes equipped to fire lasers at the earth’s surface at a rapid rate, recorded immense detail of whatever was on the ground to the accuracy of a few centimetres. The trouble came when that data had to be processed simply because there was so much of it.

Owen said files of 300GB were not uncommon and it was his job to find ways of handling that so the end user could deal with something that was much easier to manipulate.

Basically PBBI’s Discover 11 and Discover 3D 5 software, in tandem with Mapinfo Professional 10, is partly the result of his efforts to make the task of determining cut and fill for a new road for example or determining catchment boundaries and stream junctions, much easier for the user.

The software also can show, using follow up landscape scans over time, salinity propagation and vegetation regeneration after a bushfire. The latter would allow bushfire authorities, to very accurately monitor dangerously heavy undergrowth, and focus precision pre fire season burns on the worst areas.

As well, with scanning techniques developed by the military for detecting submarines up to 400m deep under water, what is under the soil’s surface can be determined with surprising accuracy, Own said.

For example a quarry could quite easily determine the extent of a particular body of rock. Then if it overlapped several property boundaries, the software would allow it to determine who should be paid royalties and how much.

The software can also create drill hole cross-sections along a non-linear path, such as required during pipeline, tunnel and aquifer analysis.

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Aerial photos don’t hack it anymore

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