The most exciting technology announcement at HXGNLive is a new ground penetrating radar (GPR) solution that dramatically lowers the bar for GPR scanning, enabling surveyors and other professionals who have hesitated to get into this lucrative market because of the complexity of interpreting GPR scans to take the leap.  Before this announcement today by Agata Fischer of Leica Geosystems, non-geotechnical professionals including surveyors were put off by GPR scans consisting of images with hyperbolas showing the reflections of RF waves from underground objects.  This left GPR pretty much to highly trained geotechnical and other underground engineering professionals.

As I discovered at a recent talk I gave to the Alberta Land Surveyors Association, there is a lot interest among the surveying community to expand their professional offerings beyond the traditional above ground survey to include below ground surveys.  Two years ago the one-button BLK360 opened up engineering grade laser scanning to a much broader professional audience.  Leica Geosystems is betting that with a similar focus on simplicity the DSX device and DXplore software announced today, is going to open GPR scanning to a much broader professional community, in particular, surveyors. 

Output from the DSX with DXplore software showing tomographic image of detected underground utilities

The key features of the DSX GPR device and DXplore software announced today are simplicity of use and interpretation, detection results that can be relied on,  immediate 2D and 3D undergound utility maps, and interoperability with CAD and other engineering products.  The DSX workflow is very simple: import available as-builts in the area as DXF or other CAD format files, define a grid for the area to be surveyed, walk the grid with the DSX device with real-time fedback on the DSX’s display, show the tomographic display (no hyperbolas !) of what was detected, manually identify suspected utilities on the display,  the software then processes the captured GPR images to confirm the utility pipe or cable, and export a 2D or 3D vector file in a CAD compatible file format.  Very simple.

But too simple for experienced GPR practitioners. I have talked to very experienced GPR people who don’t find the DSX interesting for them.  As GPR experts they are trained to work with B-scan/radargram data representation and interpretation, thus expert systems such as Leica DS2000 or IDS GeoRadar Stream are more suitable. But for people who don’t have GPR experience, believe that underground surveying represents a significant business opportunity, and already use or know Leica Geosystems total stations or other survey equipment this is a way to get their toes in the water.  Furthermore I fully expect that Leica will not stop here but will continue to develop easy to use GPR software for detecting and mapping underground infrastructure including support for the multi-channel Leica IDS Georadar arrays that are being applied to very sophisticated mapping of underground infrastructure.