Month: April 2018

Hosted by the Urban Modeling Group’s Prof. Debra Laefer, and the Director of NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, Prof. Steven Koonin, this week’s Kavli Futures Symposium: Sensing the City saw academia, industry, and community stakeholders come together to explore the multidisciplinary topic of sensing in cities. Speakers from across the US and beyond came together for a closed workshop to discuss the challenges and opportunities presented by emerging urban sensing innovations, before sharing their insights with the wider public through an open symposium on the second day of the event.  Key questions emerged around privacy, sustainability, and the ways that researchers determine what data to collect and how to collect it. 

The Urban Modeling Group looks forward to sharing video of some of the day’s events as it becomes available.

 

After over a year of planning and working with the NYC Government, the Urban Modeling Group yesterday undertook a landmark aerial data collection over 1km2 of Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Working with Tuck Mapping Solutions, Inc., the Urban Modeling Group collected imagery, hyperspectral, and extremely high resolution LiDAR data reaching densities greater than 500pts/m² over a 1km² study area in Brooklyn, NY. For the first time in the United States, all three sensors were flown concurrently on a rotary platform with a custom flight path designed using genetic algorithms to find the most optimal path to reduce occlusions and maximize vertical facade capture. 

The sensors on board were:
1. LMS Q680i for LiDAR
2. microCASI 1920 for hyperspectral
3. Leica RCD30 for imagery

In addition to the data collected over the existing urban environment, the Urban Modeling Group also deployed over 300 ground truthing experiments in the data collection area. These experiments will provide foundational data for exploring remote sensing capabilities in terms of spatial resolution, materials identification, and much more. 

The Urban Modeling Group looks forward to a public release of the data in the coming months and is open to possible collaborations and/or data sharing arrangements.

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