How LiDAR Works to Find a Lost Virtual City

Jakarta, CNN Indonesia –

Combined scientists use technology LiDAR In order to penetrate an old Maya city in the dense forests of Guatemala, scientists have uncovered a large network of ancient Mayan city ruins, which have been lost for centuries.

They found the ruins of more than 60,000 houses, palaces, highways and man-made sites, they were quoted as saying How Stuff Works.

The National Center for Airbone Laser Mapping (NCALM), described the findings spread over an area of ​​811 square miles or about 2,100 square kilometers.

LiDAR or Light Detection and Ranging works in a similar way to radar, only it uses lasers to assess distance and depth, Tech Radar.

The concept behind LiDAR dates back to the 1960s. In short, this technology makes it possible to scan and map the environment by firing a laser beam, then timing how quickly they return.

Like most futuristic technologies, LiDAR began life as a military tool on aircraft and was used in the Apollo 15 mission to map the lunar surface.

Recently, LiDAR has also been seen in self-driving cars to help detect objects such as cyclists and pedestrians.

But, in recent years LiDAR has really opened up. With systems getting smaller, cheaper, and more accurate, LiDAR is starting to become an addition to mobile devices that already have such a powerful processor.

LiDAR has a role similar to that of time-of-flight (ToF) on Android phones.

There are a number of benefits from the presence of LiDAR, for example better object occlusion, namely the emergence of virtual objects from real objects.

The LiDAR scanner data is processed together with data from the camera and motion sensor, then refined by a computer vision algorithm for a more detailed understanding of the scene.

The LiDAR scanner will improve the quality of taking photos and videos. Because, LiDAR allows 6x faster focus time in low light scenes for video and photo sessions.

The working principle of LiDAR is actually very simple. LiDAR calculates the distance by emitting light from the laser transmitter to a surface, then calculating how long it takes for the laser light to return to the receptor.

The analogy is the same as when you direct a flashlight to a surface. What actually happens is that you see a flashlight reflected from a surface onto your retina, but because the process is so fast, it happens as if it were instantaneous.

The speed of light is very high, which is around 300,000 km / second so we can’t move it directly.

LiDAR devices fire laser beams rapidly at a surface, and some LiDAR devices fire around 150,000 lasers per second.

Then the sensor component in LiDAR calculates the time it takes for each laser pulse to bounce from a surface to the sensor so that the calculation of the distance with high accuracy is obtained.

(mik / mik)

[Gambas:Video CNN]

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