County-wide 2D building footprints and 3D models from LiDAR

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2018

Miami-Dade County has an increasing demand to make better decisions and communicate ideas more effectively. Our world is three-dimensional; there is a “z” factor, an elevation. It’s so important to understand events, projects, and operations in context. How do we model it? We need height. Miami-Dade County’s GIS currently hosts over 1,200 point, line and polygon layers and 40 raster layers spanning 30 years of program development. In 2015 the County procured a county-wide LiDAR dataset. LiDAR (light detection and ranging) is a relatively new remote sensing technology that allows collecting very dense point samples of objects in 3D, storing x, y and “z” coordinates for each point. The maker of our GIS software, ESRI, evolved tools transforming 2D GIS into 3D. Coupled with the LiDAR dataset, this provided a cost-effective means to create a county-wide building dataset and its corresponding 3D models. The new dataset represents an enormous step forward in the representation of the County building infrastructure from points and large building polygons to a single county-wide dataset. It contains over 1 million polygon and multi-patch features of 2D footprints and 3D representations, providing a third dimension for county departments and citizens to perform a true-to-life spatial analysis.