The blog
Seven articles on LiDAR technology and what it changes — from geomatics to civil engineering, from forests to archaeology, through flood and landslide management.
LiDAR doesn't take a photo: it counts the time a flash of light takes to return. Millions of times a second. Here is what that simple idea makes possible.
A raw point cloud is unusable as is. Between the plane and the map, a sequence of operations separates the ground from the rest. That is where the quality of a relief is decided.
Before laying out a road or sizing a storm sewer, you have to know the ground. LiDAR replaced months of surveying with data that is already available.
Counting trees on foot doesn't scale to a forest province. The laser, on the other hand, measures the height of every parcel — and infers far more than tree size.
Structures no one had noticed while walking over them appear all at once when the trees are digitally removed. Archaeology found in the laser a prospecting tool without equal.
The floods of 2017 and 2019 showed one thing: without precise relief, you don't really know how high the water can rise. LiDAR has become the backbone of risk mapping.
In Québec, certain clays can liquefy and carry away an entire slope. Comparing two LiDAR surveys a few years apart lets you see the ground move — sometimes before it fails.