LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing technology that collects information reflected or refracted from the Earth’s surface. The instrumentation that collects LiDAR data can be housed on drones, airplanes, helicopters, or satellites, and consists of a laser scanner that transmits pulses of light. These transmitted pulses reflect or refract from objects on the Earth’s surface or from the surface itself, and the time delay is recorded. Knowing the travel time and the speed of light, an elevation of each pulse above the surface can be determined. From the pulse data collected, the user can determine the topography and landscape features of the Earth or whatever surface has received the pulses. The evolution of software that displays and analyzes LiDAR data and the development of new and more compact file formats have allowed the use of LiDAR to grow dramatically in recent years.

Indoor geographic information system (GIS) opens up a new frontier for identifying, analyzing and solving complex problems. In many indoor GIS-driven applications such as indoor wayfinding and logistics planning and management, determination of location information deserves special attention because global positioning system (GPS) may be inaccessible. Alternative methods and systems have emerged to overcome this hurdle. The time-of-arrival (TOA) measurement is one of the most adopted metrics in numerous modern systems such as radar, acoustic/ultra-sound-based tracking, ultra-wide band (UWB) indoor localization, wireless sensor networks (WSN) and Internet of things (IoT) localization. This topic presents the TOA technique and methods to solve the localization and synchronization problem. We also introduce variants of the TOA system schemes, which are adopted by real-world applications. As a use case of the TOA technique realized in practice, a UWB localization system is introduced. Examples are given to demonstrate that indoor localization and GIS are tightly interconnected.

Georeferencing is the recording of the absolute location of a data point or data points. Georectification refers to the removal of geometric distortions between sets of data points, most often the removal of terrain, platform, and sensor induced distortions from remote sensing imagery. Georeferencing is a requisite task for all spatial data, as spatial data cannot be positioned in space or evaluated with respect to other data that are without being assigned a spatial coordinate within a defined coordinate system. Many data are implicitly georeferenced (i.e., are labeled with spatial reference information), such as points collected from a global navigation satellite system (GNSS). Data that are not labeled with spatial reference information can be georeferenced using a number of approaches, the most commonly applied of which are described in this article. The majority of approaches employ known reference locations (i.e., Ground Control Points) drawn from a reliable source (e.g., GNSS, orthophotography) to calibrate georeferencing models. Regardless of georeferencing approach, positional error is present. The accuracy of georeferencing (i.e., amount of positional error) should be quantified, typically by the root mean squared error between ground control points from a reference source and the georeferenced data product.