The Future of Lidar: Exploring Miniaturization, AI Integration, and Applications

Lidar technology is evolving at a rapid pace, pushing the boundaries of geospatial data collection and transforming industries worldwide. To gain deeper insights into the latest innovations and trends, we spoke with Dr. Tim Webster, a recognized authority in the field, with extensive experience in lidar applications across various sectors. As the moderator for the upcoming LidarCANEX 2025 — Canada’s premier platform for reality capture technology and lidar innovation — he brings a wealth of knowledge and a forward-thinking perspective on the future of lidar.

In this interview, Dr. Webster shares his thoughts on groundbreaking advancements in lidar, the impact of AI and miniaturization, and how lidar is shaping the future of digital twins, disaster resilience, and smart cities. Reflecting on the event, he notes that LidarCANEX will provide a unique opportunity to explore the latest applications of lidar technology, bridging the gap between emerging technologies and real-world problem-solving.

What do you see as the most groundbreaking innovations in the field today? How are new developments, such as miniaturization or integration with AI, changing how lidar is used across industries?

Passing the threshold of 200,000,000 pulses per second was a huge milestone. Lately, the advancement of topo-bathymetric lidar for drones hitting the market has changed and has been interesting to watch.

In the remote sensing and lidar world we have been using machine learning to process data for a long time. However, new algorithms today are offering approaches that need to be tested and validated but could improve many processes.

How has the accessibility and affordability of lidar technology improved, and what impact is this having on adoption rates?

When DJI released the L1 lidar that could be mounted on the RTK M300 drone, it opened up lidar data collection to a broader audience beyond just mapping professionals.

With the latest L2 lidar, it shows significant improvements in point density and accuracy. I am concerned, however, about non-professionals collecting and processing data that they do not fully understand, especially the subtle errors that can arise. Similarly, a few years ago when Apple equipped the iPhone and iPad with lidar, this expanded who and what people were using lidar for.

What are the biggest challenges currently facing the lidar industry, particularly in data acquisition, processing, or accessibility?

Data acquisition is still limited by weather and in some cases, environmental conditions on the ground, especially with topo-bathy lidar, and the ability to fly higher may seem like a great improvement. But if you have to get above the clouds this advantage is gone. With the increased point density and resolution, point classification is still a big challenge, and in some cases we see variance in the data, often resulting in much of it being classified as noise rather than keeping those points, yet still meeting the specifications.

Clients want more and more detail classified from the point cloud, in the earliest days, people only needed the ground to be classified, but now the need for additional classifications has grown much beyond that which is driving different uses of these data and better models representing features. Accessibility has improved with cloud-based storage, people no longer get the data delivered on external hard drives, but rather pull it off servers, making everything faster and more efficient. As long as server space continues to expand, more and more point cloud and raster data can be served.

Are there any emerging trends or technologies you believe will significantly impact lidar’s future? And which industries are likely to lead in adopting these trends?

There are some emerging technologies like “Gaussian Splats” that have come from photogrammetry that appear well suited for representing point clouds derived from lidar. The lidar data can be visualized not as points but rather as Gaussian distributions of returned energy from the laser, which is how the systems work prior to discrete points being extracted from these laser waveform returns, thus providing a truer representation of what the lidar instrument measured. By adding color or other sensor information, the visualizations of the data can be greatly improved compared to simply visualizing the colorized point clouds.

Currently, it appears to be the industries pushing digital twins, including BIM and other natural landscape surveys. We see the potential for this technology to assist in topo-bathymetric lidar data where the green laser waveform returned from the seabed can be complex and can contain multiple targets and in some cases the laser footprint will overlap with the adjacent pulse, potentially offering the ability to resolve finer targets.

A significant number of surveys have been conducted in cities to enable Digital Twins for moving towards Smart Cities. Of course, traditional uses like floodplain mapping, forestry, powerlines, and vegetation encroachment continue to be areas of considerable activity.

Could you elaborate on the role lidar has played in advancing flood mapping and disaster resilience in Canada?

Lidar has been an enabling technology for many of the new floodplain mapping projects going on in Canada supported by the federal government’s Flood Hazard Identification and Mapping Program (FHIMP). There is a recognition of the potential improvements to flood hazard modelling along the coast and for rivers that topo-bathymetric lidar offers, to be able to generate a seamless model of the flood plain and river channel, or the coast and nearshore bathymetry. There are for and more RFPs calling for these surveys and the industry is starting to move to these enhanced elevation models for improved flood model predictions. Some case studies include river mapping in Saskatchewan and Quebec as examples.

What other industries or projects in Canada do you think could significantly benefit from wider adoption of lidar?

In some jurisdictions, the time has come to refresh the lidar previously acquired. This offers a new and significant opportunity to use multi-temporal lidar to measure change and update data that may be out of date. This includes the urban environment where changes in the landscape result from new transportation activity, or the natural landscape in the case of landslides, or changes along the coast from storm events, including coastal erosion on land and how the nearshore environment has changed.

How does Canada’s use of lidar compare with others?

Canada still holds a place as one of the technological leaders when it comes to lidar and its applications. However, I think Canada is still working on surveying our vast land mass with emphasis on where people live, to support things like the FHMP mentioned earlier. We are also using it for resource inventory and exploration (forestry, geology, etc.) and utility mapping for the electrical transmission lines. The ability to move to a more cluttered environment to map the electoral distribution system is an area we may see growth in. This could stem from the increase in mobile mapping projects that often concentrate on the transportation system and adjacent infrastructure but may offer additional insights into what’s above to complement aerial surveys. Utilizing lidar to extract more details of the forest in terms of fuel to support wildlife risk mapping and behavior modeling is an area we could see expand. In terms of repeat surveys of urban and coastal environments, this is commonplace south of the border with NOAA and now the USGS is contracting more and more river surveys.

As the moderator for LidarCANEX 2025, what are you most excited about for this event?

I always enjoy hearing about the latest innovations from lidar manufacturers and the latest projects that lidar providers are doing. Hearing these professionals gives you insights into what the industry is doing currently and where the technology is moving to in the future. For example, are lidar manufacturers moving to make smaller systems on smaller platforms, or the other way to allow larger systems to fly higher and gather more data per flight.

I hope they take away the same things I mentioned. Most attendees are probably more interested in the latest applications of how lidar is solving important problems we face. As we have observed from the past, in this field technology drives innovation of how and what these data can be used for. So, the LidarCANEX gives a nice blend of both worlds including lidar from multiple platforms, now just aerial, but rather mobile, indoor, etc.