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Jake Jenkins is the Director of Optech’s Terrestrial Survey Division and has worked in mapping and remote sensing businesses for over 30 years. Jake spent the last few years before joining Optech as Chief Operating Officer of a leading lidar survey and remote sensing firm in western Canada. Having coordinated and worked on mapping projects all around the world, Mr. Jenkins is very familiar with the day-to-day operations of companies offering mapping services, including lidar, and understands what service organizations need from their suppliers. Mr Jenkins shared his views on ALTM in an interview with GIS Development.
ALTM is emerging as a technology as well as a solution for varied applications. How would you like to profile the evolution of this technique over the last decade in overall terms?
We see Lidar as emerging in some markets, namely Africa, the Middle East and some parts of Asia, but fully emerged in others, like Europe, North America and the Far East. I think a better word is expanding, and by technique, I think you mean technology.
Lidar has grown very much over the last 20 years, from our early lidar bathymetry projects in Canada’s far north to the present use of lidar data to support such e-commerce applications as Google Earth. Early on, the market was unsure of the actual usability and accuracy of lidar, but now these questions have been successfully addressed and people are coming to us with new applications that no one ever imagined when lidar first appeared. Lidar initially was seen a competing technology, but now it is a complementary technology to a wide range of other geo-solutions.
Optech has made a clear mark in the industry in the areas of laser based survey systems in recent history. How would you attribute the significance of laser-based surveys in contemporary societies and align Optech’s vision alongside?
Optech has always had a commitment to science and humanity's need for more information. This is demonstrated by the recent appointment of our founder, Dr. Allan Carswell, to the Order of Canada, the highest civilian award in Canada. Dr. Carswell received the award in the recognition of his contributions over the past 30 years in the discipline of Science in general and Lidar in particular. He has been involved with lasers since they first appeared. He started in the academic world and remained a full professor, and that collegial, creative approach, with a heavy emphasis on R&D and the physics underlying our systems – the why and not just the how – has continued even as we have developed ourselves into a full engineering/manufacturing company as well.
In terms of significance in contemporary societies, laser-based surveys give rapid, detailed, digital data that can be easily visualized and compared over time. This gives decision-makers verifiable and accurate data for their decisions and allows them to respond quickly to events.
And I suppose that some of the most obvious traits of contemporary societies – the tendency for things to get faster, smaller, more customized and more safety-conscious – are reflected in Optech's product evolution. Our products use higher laser pulse rates, become more compact and portable, and are increasingly customized, as well as being engineered for safety and eyesafe wherever possible.
In all these aspects, I think Optech's scientists and engineers give us a huge advantage. We do lidar science exclusively, so we do more than trot out a single, packaged "solution". Custom systems, new products and programmability all flow from this deep understanding of lidar and related technologies.
Additionally, we have seen the market respond to Optech’s commitment by making our airborne solutions #1 in sales, worldwide. Because of our diverse customer base and our policy of developing technology from the insights of our customers, we have been able to develop the only truly programmable sensor on the market today, which allows for great versatility. This versatility can be realized by noting the worldwide coverage of Optech airborne lidar sensors on every continent except Antarctica. Worldwide, our sensors have been used to support a variety of applications including disaster management, resource management, cadastre applications, forestry applications, mining, orthophoto applications and general mapping requirements.
LiDAR as a technology is increasingly being preferred for certain specific applications not only in Europe and Americas but also the now in Asia and Middle East. How would you comment on LiDAR as a technology over other laser based survey systems?
Lidar is a tool whose full potential is yet to be realized. For example, lidar has been instrumental in changing the way the electric transmission industry manages its assets, and lidar is now the technology of choice for disaster management owing to the marriage of a full 3D view with Active Laser Photo (intensity images). Additionally, in recent months we have seen amazing advancements in the use of Active Laser Photos in softcopy photogrammetric applications.
Optech sees lidar not as a competing technology to traditional mapping and surveying methods, but as a complementary one. Advancements in feature extraction software and overall lidar accuracy will undoubtedly infringe on the large-scale mapping market in the future, as lidar has infringed on both small- and medium-scale projects in the past ten years.
Most laser based surveys are expensive in comparison to traditional survey methods. How would you like to comment on this aspect with respect to the developing economies and the growth of the market there?
The “lidar being expensive” opinion is basically a myth. The cost of the capital expenditure is in direct relationship to the value the lidar sensor brings to the organization. Traditional means of data acquisition are, for the most part, labour-intensive with little hope or promise of automation. Lidar, on the other hand, is rapidly becoming fully automated in operation, data processing and feature extraction. Additionally, the by-products of lidar, namely Active Laser Photos and Waveform Digitization, offer an inexpensive new product as a replacement for very expensive traditional technologies. The value is seen in the diversity of data products, the speed of data acquisition, and the accuracy. All these factors make lidar an attractive technology for developing economies that are beginning to grapple with environmental data collection and management.
Developing economies often face environmental tragedies – mudslides from erosion bringing down hillsides packed with shanty housing, for instance, repeated flooding of populated coastal areas, volcanic eruptions and lava flow into highly fertile, highly populated areas – that kill many people and injure fragile economies. The regions can be devastated; they very often lose more people than Western Europe and North America would in the same circumstances, and don’t have the economic strength to bounce back. So if their planners and decision-makers know that there's a quick and accurate technology out there that can monitor their environment and infrastructure, and that the technology is widely trusted and supported, they can ride on that prior acceptance - minimize risk and improve their ability to protect their citizens.
More happily, developing economies are often growing quickly, and mapping your environment is the first step in channeling growth – road building, bridges, new settlements, power transmission, urban sprawl – away from unsustainable areas and into robust ones.
Tell us something about the latest technological updates in Optech’s line of products.
Optech has always focused on the needs of our customers, and as our customer base has grown, they have asked for more versatility and programmability. These requests have been converted into new products and services here. First, we have developed a Waveform Digitizer, which has enormous benefits for both the forestry and military markets; and second, we have just announced the arrival of our latest model, the ALTM 3100EA. This Enhanced-Accuracy ALTM is the direct result of customer requests for a lidar system for large-scale mapping applications.
In addition to our system advancements, we have formed strong technology partnerships with industry-leading companies, and instituted a 24/7 Customer Support Group. This group will centralize our technical support and provide continuous support for our customers worldwide, serving as a central knowledge base for customers.
How bright is the future of SHOALS, CMS and other industry specific products?
We believe that the future of all our products is very bright because of our commitment to our customers, which leads us to develop products that are targeted to their needs in the marketplace. With disaster management on everyone’s minds after the tsunami in South-East Asia and the hurricanes in the southern USA, the SHOALS system's potential has risen ten-fold. The newly re-designed ILRIS is making a huge impact, and the CMS continues to be an industry leader in the mining community. The rise in demand for geo-data for consumers directly affects our customers and their requests to use Optech science to develop practical tools and systems to meet this demand.
How would you like to comment on Asia and Middle East as user markets in terms of maturity, awareness and applications?
Optech sees a range of applications in Asia and the Middle East, with some specific areas of interest. In Asia, disaster management, coastal monitoring and forestry applications are vital, and our ALTMs can certainly fit that role. In the Middle East, security issues are always a high priority, as well as resource management and infrastructure management, and we look forward to developing regional capabilities in those areas.
Our job in the Middle East is clear to us, and it is one of education. It's something we're familiar with, since we have had to educate many potential users in our new technology and suitable applications – more or less create a market, as we did for the ALTM when we first offered it. Lidar is accepted in most of the world, and now demand for it is being felt in the Middle East as well. Because of the unique characteristics of the region, we are continuing our program of education and information dissemination. We expect that the Middle East will embrace our technology fully when multiple positioning solutions become available.
As for Asia, we have seen tremendous growth here, and with our delivery of an ALTM 3100 to China, we now have lidar systems in every major market with the exception of India. We expect that with a combination of 24/7 support, system versatility and a focus on the unique needs of the customer, we should see continued success in Asia.
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