Towards in-flight quality assessment of airborne laser scanning

One of the main problems of today's ALS is the lack of reliable data quality assessment within or shortly after the airborne survey campaign. The paper presents an in- flight quality monitoring tool that allows assessing the quality of the recorded data "on the fly", featuring a real- time processing of the GPS/INS data and the subsequent georeferencing of the laser returns. The tool is capable of displaying the scanning profress in real-time and detecting data gaps immediately after terminating the strip. The paper presents the adopted strategy for data processing and communicating in order to achieve scalable distribution across a network of computers. Further we discuss first experiences with this tool within airborne survey projects that demonstrate its successful application in practice.