Sometimes More is Just More.

Management of point data sets is already a concern for clients.  Now the industry promotes its efficiency at the cost of best practices with a million point per second milestone.  I liken this announcement to Chuck Yeager’s aircraft, “Glamorous Glennis”, as the tool that broke the sound barrier at a speed Mach 1.015. The race for faster was at the expense of many pilots and aircraft just to reach a milestone.  Although I don’t see this as a sonic boom it does seem to be making a lot of noise even among users of existing 400,000 point systems. Do we really need more?  Check out SparView™ issue Vol. 8, No. 11 -  Oct. 6, 2010 http://www.sparllc.com/archiveviewer.php?vol=08&num=11&file=vol08no11-03&utm_source=NewsLinks&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=SPARView

“I’m not sure that we as an end user need to be at a million points per second,” Gordon Perry, Senior Project Manager at Surveying and Mapping Inc., Austin, Texas said. “We’re quite happy with 400,000 points per second. And we’re producing some really great products for clients with that.”

and POB’s article by Larry Trojak, Mining Data, June 1, 2010 http://www.pobonline.com/Articles/Features/BNP_GUID_9-5-2006_A_10000000000000835093

“We quickly found that there’s no reason for millions of points when far fewer will do just fine,” PERC Engineering, Lynell Early, Vice President of surveying says. “Now, we generally do no more than seven scans, which gives us about 400,000 points and a nice, manageable point cloud.”

Quality verses quantity is what we are really addressing.  Putting down more scan lines per second or more points on the line is only advantageous along as you are using best practices.  The end result is are you capturing what you need and where you need it or just increasing your files sizes to boast more? It’s not the speed at which you collect, it’s the management time it takes to handle the data.  Let go back to the traditional surveying of Plus and Distance Out where you actually shot a grid of points plus any additional break lines, curb lines, building corners and the like.  Next generation surveying was total stations which relied on the experience of the surveyor to identify needed points which eliminated the grids thus cutting down on time and data management. Total stations could collect many more points per hour than the traditional Plus and Distance Out in the hands of an experienced field person that knew how to collect just the needed number of points to represent the topography and spatial features correctly.  The same is true with mobile scanning.  An example is the assumption that more points are needed on an incline verses flat ground. When in actuality the reverse is true. Typically the flatter the surface the more points you need.

More is not better… sometimes it’s just more.