ABSTRACT
Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) has been widely used in many studies in urban environments. In the review by Yan on LiDAR for urban land cover classification, five applications were discussed: urban morphology and green analysis, urban flood risk modeling, mapping power transmission lines, modeling Global Positioning System (GPS)/airport signal obstruction, and solar radiation assessment. This chapter presents six major topics of LiDAR applications in urban environments: road extraction, building extraction and 3D reconstruction, population estimation, change detection, assessment of post-disaster building damage, and assessment of post-disaster road blockage. It presents two step-by-step projects in ArcGIS to showcase LiDAR-based powerline corridor analysis and small-area population estimation using building count, building area, and building volume in Denton, TX, USA. Population estimation using remote sensing and geographic information system (GIS) belongs to the ratio-correlation method, and can be classified into two broad categories: areal interpolation and statistical modeling.
