ITT Corporation, subsidiary ITT Visual Information Solutions (VIS) has released E3De, a new, interactive software environment for visualizing and extracting three dimensional features and products from Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, data. ITT VIS is a leading developer of software products for data visualization and image analysis.
E3De allows users to understand a geographic area of interest from all angles by creating realistic 3-D visualizations of manmade and natural features from point cloud data. The resulting products and visualizations add valuable information to a wide variety of geospatial applications including assessing forest inventories, mapping urban growth, visualizing terrain and determining power line locations.
“Used in a variety of industries from forestry to defense and intelligence, LiDAR has become increasingly popular in recent years for the important 3-D information it provides about objects in a geospatial context,” said Beau Legeer, vice president of product marketing with ITT VIS. “E3De delivers the software analysis tools that geospatial analysts need to quickly and accurately get 3-D information from LiDAR point cloud data and easily integrate the information into other applications such as ENVI and ArcGIS.”
E3De’s advanced software technology allows users to ingest native LAS, NITF LAS and ASCII files, prepare the LiDAR data, fly through a realistic scene, identify and extract features, refine the resulting products, and, if desired, export the results for further analysis. In addition to the standard topographic products, E3De allows users to create advanced 3-D products from LiDAR data. These include trees, buildings, power lines and power poles. E3De products can be integrated to other geospatial applications through a single-button export to ENVI or as shapefiles for inclusion in GIS (geographic information systems) mapping applications.