Airborne LiDAR: state-of-the-art of system design, technology and application

In the last two decades, airborne LiDAR, as an active remote sensing technique, has emerged as one of the most effective and reliable means of 3D point clouds collection. This paper presents a survey of the literature related to these techniques, emphasizing state-of-art trends in system design as well as data processing techniques and their impact on various applications. With the challenging requirements of airborne surveying and mapping, the novel LiDAR system design appears to improve data collection ability and derived product resolution/accuracy. Based on a full range of spectral, spatial and temporal properties of the data obtained, recently proposed methods and techniques are presented here to instigate further possibilities for land and urban topography, forest and bathymetric surveying. The conclusion discusses possible developments for more advanced high performance airborne LiDAR systems, allowing spectral detection and geometrical extraction for improved understanding of urban infrastructure planning and natural resource management. (topical review)