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LiDAR technology is based on sensors that emit laser light and collect their reflection in the target in the earth's surface. When the sensor is shipped in an aerial vehicle (light aircraft, helicopters, drones, ...) it is called aerial LiDAR. The information obtained with this technology constitutes a dense cloud of three-dimensional points characterized by the position, with high precision, in the space of each of the points where the laser beam is reflected, and the number of rebounds produced by the laser beam, as well as the intensity of the reflected beam among other characteristics. All this information is useful in many applications.

At CiTIUS we develop algorithms to process these clouds of points for different practical purposes. In particular, this video shows some results in differente problems, among others:

• Search of landing areas for helicopters in emergency situations (for example, in actions in forest fires, or in the evacuation of people).
• Characterization of roads and ways.
• Identification and precise study of power lines and their surroundings.

We are currently expanding our research to new applications and to the use of point clouds obtained by terrestrial LiDAR.

We are also analyzing the adaptation of our developments to clouds of 3D points obtained with different technologies such as photogrammetry, which is based on images and has properties very different from those of the LiDAR point clouds. From the computing point of view, the most important challenge is to be able to process such a massive amount of data with high performance both in terms of execution times (mainly using parallel computing techniques) and the efficient use of computer memory (introducing new parallel storage structures that take advantage of the locality of our algorithms)