Laser Mapping Specialists - The premier LIDAR mapping company in the US

Laser Mapping Specialists, Inc. (LMSI) is one of the premier providers of airborne laser mapping in the United States. LMSI is a woman owned small business founded in 1998 by a staff that pioneered the commercial use of Optech’s Airborne Laser Terrain Mapping (ALTM) system over nine years ago. For five years, while at other companies, our key managers mapped hundreds of thousands of acres of land for engineering design, hydrologic modeling and planning applications. They have worked from the Arctic North to South America and performed the first county wide LIDAR mapping project in the US providing 1’ contour mapping for Chatham County, Georgia, and have provided survey data for the design of tens of millions of dollars in engineering projects including the Panama Canal Railroad re-build.

We started LMSI because we believe we can provide a superior airborne laser survey in less time with better quality, and more cost effectively than anyone else. During the past five years we have mapped projects all over the United States, including a 260 mile corridor from Albuquerque to El Paso, Barron Co, WI (1000 sq mi), Jackson Co, OH, (600 sq mi), Ross Co, OH (500 sq mi), St. Louis Co, MO (620 sq mi), Liberty Co, GA (500 sq mi), Lumpkin Co, GA (350 sq mi), Genesee Co, MI (820 sq mi), Beaufort Co, SC, (754 sq mi), Marion Co, IN (490 sq mi), Madison Co, IN (490 sq mi), Vigo Co, IN, (500 sq mi), Boone City, IA, Clarksburg, MD, Fairfield, CT and dozens of other projects including airports, transportation projects, development projects and many others.

Airborne laser mapping can produce high accuracy digital terrain models (DTM) with vertical accuracies better than 15cm (6”). Being Professional Land Surveyors, we developed our own techniques similar to those developed for conventional survey practices. Using these techniques, on our Beaufort County 1’ contour mapping project, we produced a FEMA compliant LIDAR survey with an RMSE error of better than 7cm, a feat unequaled in the LIDAR industry. We had a 4cm RMSE as validated against GCP’s for Madison County. LMSI has produced a LIDAR flood plain survey on almost every LIDAR project they have flown.

We use Optech’s airborne laser mapping system, which is capable of recording up to 100,000 individual laser ranges per second, recording both the first pulse return for vegetation and canopy heights and the last pulse return for potential ground contact points and is also capable of recording additional returns if required.. The system also records the laser intensity return from each laser spot. This allows for the creation of a low-resolution gray scale image of the laser survey, day or night as shown above. The system has an operational altitude of 400’agl to over 10000’ agl.

LASER SPECIFICATIONS [ALTM 2033]
Operating altitude	80 - 3,500 m nominal
Elevation accuracy	Better than 10 cm at 1,000 m; 15 cm at 2,000 m (1 sigma)
Scan angle	Variable from 0 to ± 25°
Swath width	Variable from 0 to 0.93 x altitude
Scan frequency	Variable, max 70 Hz
Horizontal accuracy	Better than 1/5,500 x altitude
GPS receiver	Any dual frequency receiver
Laser repetition rate	up to 100 kHz
Beam divergence	Variable, 0.3 mrad (1/e) or 0.8mrad
Laser classification	Class IV laser product (FDA CFR 21)
Eyesafe range	150 m @ 1.0 mrad, 400 m @ 0.2 mrad nominal

We also have a Rollei 4k x 5k medium format color digital frame camera integrated with the LIDAR system and can capture simultaneous digital ortho photography in the same flight as the LIDAR. The image below is a sample of our true color digital photography from one of our projects.


Rollei 22MP color digital camera	Color Ortho Photo	3D Photo Drape