OPALS workshop (Feb 23+24, 2011)

Venue: TU Vienna, Inst. of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Gusshausstr. 27-29 1040 Vienna Seminar room 122
Date: Feb 23, 2011 (9:00-17:00) Workshop Day 1 Feb 24, 2011 (9:00-17:00) Workshop Day

Audience:
The workshop addresses customers, students and/or collaborators from abroad, as well as PhD
students from the I.P.F. Whereas 10 seats are reserved for I.P.F. staff, approximately 10 more
places are offered in a first-come first-serve principle. Some familiarity with laser scanning is
required for profiting from the workshop. The course will be held in English.

Goals:
The aim of the workshop is to provide an introduction into the principles of Airborne Laser
Scanning (ALS) and the software OPALS (Orientation and Processing of Airborne Laser Scanning
data). First, ALS and OPALS theory is presented in a series of lectures including: Full waveform
signal processing and radiometric calibration, quality control, ALS strip adjustment, forestry
applications, and concept of OPALS (Day 1, morning session).
The main part of the workshop is dedicated to practical examples using OPALS. The complexity of
the data processing will increase gradually. First, the OPALS’ stand alone command line programs
will be used to carry out individual tasks (DSM grid computation and visualization, full wave form
signal processing) and simple batch scripts will by generated to construct more complex work
flows. Detailed OPALS concepts (data filtering, parameter passing, log files, etc) will be
introduced by and by (Day 1, afternoon session). Day 2 mainly focuses on more sophisticated
scripting concepts and strategies to set up arbitrary processing chains. The scripting and
programming language Python is introduced. In practical examples a complete workflow for
quality control will be set up (Day 2, morning session). Finally, more packages (improvement of
georeferencing, forestry) are introduced and strategies for parallel processing are targeted (Day 2,
afternoon). The latter includes the use of multi-core CPUs as well as distributing tasks on multiple
computers over the network (grid/cloud computing). The exercise will be conducted in the classroom with 2-3 participants per computer. The lecturer
will be supported by tutors. Participants will gain a deeper understanding of laser scanning and
become familiar with OPALS for the exploitation of this knowledge.

Download more information and schedule (pdf)