Lidar 7 11 2012 COSMOS DLS
Channel: cosmosucdavis
Date: 2012-07-17

Professor Nina Amenta, UC Davis Vice Chair of the Information Technology unit Research in the Interest of Society, Computer Science discusses LiDAR - Cap and Trade and Probability.
Deforestation is responsible for around 12% of global carbon emissions, threatening the
Earth's climate within our lifetimes. If we can monitor the status of forests, it will help manage our planetary carbon budget. One way to get detailed forest data is with LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging): we fly over the forest in a plane, shoot a laser pulse down onto it, and see how long it takes the light to get back to the plane. This gives amazingly accurate 3D images of the forest as a scatter of dots. But getting a computer to find the trees in the scatter is a tricky and interesting problem. We'll look at one way, which takes random guesses and quickly filters out the bad ones.