Airborne Hydrography

About Airborne Hydrography

Seamless coverage from land, to shallow water, to sea bottom

Leica Geosystems and its subsidiary Airborne Hydrography AB (AHAB) develop and sell airborne Lidar survey systems for bathymetric and topographic surveys. The Leica-AHAB product line includes three new, state of the art products. The HawkEye™ III is a world unique three-channel survey system. It has two bathymetric channels, optimised for deep and shallow surveying, and one simultaneously operating topographic channel. The new Chiroptera™ II is optimised for nearshore, shallow water charting and coastal zone monitoring.

The DragonEye Dual Head is an industry leading 1MHz high-resolution oblique Lidar system optimised for corridor mapping, typically of urban areas and infrastructures. The DragonEye, Chiroptera II and HawkEye III integrate with the Leica RCD30 digital camera (80 megapixel) and other sensors for additional data capture, 3D imaging and documentation.

The Lidar Survey Studio 2.1 software suite for post-processing of Lidar data includes tools for seabed characterisation, automatic water refraction correction and tools for easy assessment and analysis of collected data. LSS allows reviewing of the collected full waveforms. The output data, in LAS 1.4 format, is compatible with other Leica software such as Tridicon for generation of 3D city models.

Leica-AHAB provides turn-key systems and all necessary hardware and software for ease of use, easy installation and post-processing of point-cloud raw data. The standard output in LAS format can be further processed for end products such as DEMs, coastal erosion and flooding analysis and more.