LPS eATE at ERDAS Labs

You may have seen the press release regarding the new ERDAS Labs website. One area I would like to highlight is the LPS eATE Preview section. This features a movie and a blog post (New Algorithm for Automatic Terrain Extraction) by Dr. Neil Woodhouse, who has been involved with our new terrain project since the start. As he suggests in the post, we chose to develop a completely new solution rather than incrementally improving the current LPS ATE product - which was originally released as Orthobase Pro back in 2001.

Both the movie and the article feature Neil working with and discussing auto-correlated terrain persisted in the LAS format, which is more commonly associated with LIDAR data but also makes a great deal of sense for dense (high resolution) terrain data as well. Note that the software used to present the data Neil discusses in the movie is the FugroViewer, which I discussed here. One of the nice aspects of the FugroViewer is that is shows RGB-encoding for both the point cloud and a derived TIN - which is great for visualization of the terrain surface.

One other thing to note is that eATE is still under development, but we are looking forward to releasing the initial version!