PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
February 2019
85
BOOK
REVIEW
Topographic Laser
Ranging and Scanning:
Principles and Processing
Edited by Jie Shan Ph.D. and
Charles Toth Ph.D.
Second edition. CRC Press, Taylor &
Francis Group, Boca Raton, Florida. 2018.
xxvi and 637 pp, 97 color and 459 black
and white illustrations, tables, index.
Hardcover. ISBN 978-1-4987-7227-3.
Reviewed by
Stewart
Walker, Ph.D., sole proprietor,
photogrammetry4u, San Diego,
California.
This is the second edition of a major textbook on lidar, covering the hardware, soft-
ware and applications of terrestrial, mobile, airborne and spaceborne systems in
depth. The editors are well known, highly respected academics from Purdue Uni-
versity (Shan) and The Ohio State University (Toth), who have presided over 32
talented contributors, drawn from industry, government and academia in multiple
countries. The publisher enumerated the success of the first edition in support of
its decision to go for a second: “With over 1900 hardback copies sold worldwide
and thousands of subscriptions’ downloads, the first edition reached students and
professionals in [multiple] fields.” Further motivation was the desire to include de-
velopments since the first edition, especially UAV-borne and commercial versions of
single-photon and Geiger-mode systems, as well as software developments, some of
which grew from deeper involvement in lidar of the remote sensing and computer
vision communities.
The book begins with an introduction to laser ranging, followed by two hefty
chapters covering hardware aspects of terrestrial, mobile, airborne and spaceborne
systems. The fastidiousness with which the information has been collected and tax-
onomies developed to put the systems in perspective for the reader is apparent. Nev-
ertheless, the stream of short sections describing systems produced, to around the end
of 2016, could perhaps have been supplemented by graphics showing how some of the
main system parameters have evolved. Chapter 4, lidar systems and calibration, ex-
plains full systems and the issues involved with registration and calibration. Chapter
5-7 are theoretical treatments of: pulsed laser ranging techniques, including signal
strength, waveform digitization, discrete returns and photon counting; the georefer-
encing component; and full-waveform analysis. Chapter12, forest inventory, is appli-
cations-oriented. Chapter 13 is an important discussion of the integration of lidar and
photogrammetric data, focusing on triangulation and orthorectification. Chapter 14,
feature extraction in urban areas, begins a long section on city applications, with five
further chapters on: global solutions to building segmentation and reconstruction;
building and road extraction; progressive modeling of 3D rooftops; automated con-
struction of building models; and quality of extracted building models.
Users of the first edition may be interested specifically in the updates. The first
three chapters have been subject to a thorough revision, to include the many new
developments and the technological changes on which they depend. Chapters 7, 8, 10
and 17 have undergone significant overhauls and extensions. Chapter 15 a complete
replacement of the one in the first edition. There are further updates throughout most
of the book, though the preface points out that chapters 5, 6 and 14 are primarily theo-
retical and have not required revision. As a result, the page count has increased by 48.
Topographic Laser Ranging and Scanning: Principles and Processing
is well
produced, with clear text and well chosen, informative illustrations. The chapters
have been written by experts in their fields, so not only are there overlaps, but the
authors’ emphases necessarily reflect their research foci. These are hardly demer-
its, given the underlying didactic purpose. There are copious references at the end
of every chapter and a useful, 15-page index. The book is expensive, however, as
is typical for textbooks aimed at small markets. Nevertheless, teachers, students
and practitioners should certainly have it on their shelves or demand it from their
libraries. There are useful complementary works, especially the recently arrived
third edition of
Digital Elevation Model Technologies and Applications: The DEM
Users Manual
from ASPRS, which also offers the
Airborne Topographic Lidar Man-
ual
. There are less weighty works too. The second edition of Shan and Toth, howev-
er, is a
magnum opus
, which will deservedly serve as readers’ primary source for the
knowledge essential to be effective in the increasingly important and fast-changing
world of lidar.
Photogrammetric Engineering &
Remote Sensing
Vol. 85, No. 2, February 2019, pp. 85.
0099-1112/18/85
© 2019 American Society for
Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing
doi: 10.14358/PERS.85.2.85
