3D LiDAR: acquisition techniques and industrial applications

3D technology, and LiDAR in particular, is benefiting from a strong acceleration in both software and hardware. The autonomous car market, estimated to be worth several billion euros, has seen the emergence of dozens of players offering increasingly precise and less expensive solutions. At the same time, recent advances in the analysis of massive data, notably with artificial intelligence, are opening the door to a wide range of applications thanks to precise, large-scale processing.

This article reviews advances in this technology to help the reader assess the suitability of LiDAR for an industrial project.

The article is organized as follows. Section 1 describes the different techniques for acquiring 3D information, and the advantages and disadvantages of each. The 2 section focuses on LiDAR, which is the most powerful and widespread technology available today. The different configurations of the acquisition system are presented, from the point of view of mounting on a fixed tripod or onboard a vehicle, to the frequency used and the beam steering technology. Once the point cloud has been acquired, the 3 section presents the analysis stages of a processing chain from raw cloud to final application, as well as the techniques used to extract relevant information...