View Proposal

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Proposer

Phil Bartie

Title

Realtime Visibility Analysis (geospatial)

Goal

Develop a near-real-time web service that determines which geographic features are visible from a given location in Scotland.

Description

Develop a web service and API that accepts an observer location, either from HTML5 geolocation or from a location selected on a web map. The service will analyse the surrounding landscape and return a map and/or list of visible geographic features, such as buildings, hills, rivers and beaches. A viewshed will be generated from the observer location using either a Digital Surface Model (DSM) derived from LiDAR data or directly from 3D LiDAR point clouds. The project will investigate and develop algorithms for efficient line-of-sight and visibility analysis using dense 3D spatial datasets. The resulting visibility information will then be combined with other geographic datasets to identify and provide information about the visible features. For example, the system could identify the name and type of a visible hill, building, river or beach. The service should operate in near-real-time and support large geographic datasets covering different spatial scales and resolutions. This may require the use of appropriate spatial indexing, data tiling and/or multi-resolution datasets to efficiently process areas at different distances from the observer. The developed visibility engine and algorithms will be evaluated using real-world locations and datasets, with performance and accuracy assessed against appropriate reference data or established visibility-analysis methods.

Resources

Data - OSM, Digimap + SEPA (LiDAR)

Background

Url

Difficulty Level

Moderate

Ethical Approval

None

Number Of Students

0

Supervisor

Phil Bartie

Keywords

Degrees

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science
Bachelor of Science in Computer Systems
Master of Engineering in Software Engineering
Master of Science in Data Science