My day to day

My current job revolves around LiDAR. From scanning with a LiDAR device to building algorithms in Python, I’ve spent the last 2-3 years writing code that takes a point cloud as an input and outputs metrics about the space scanned. At first, I was only responsible for building the functions to calculate a certain building metric, but recently I have taken on more work and lead our team of 4 developers. These new responsibilities include leading scrum calls, delegating features to be developed, and representing the team in leadership calls.

Although my brief CV experience before this project was mostly CNNs, I spend most of my time using classical CV methods. Because of the scale of scans I process, it isn’t practical to use AutoDesk ReCap or CloudCompare to make numerous manual measurements. Since the building structure is very similar across the dataset, converting the point cloud to voxels and rasterizing that into images is sufficient and provides consistent results. I regularly use packages like open3d and opencv when writing image processing algorithms, but I mostly handwrite algorithms.

In order to support the amount of point clouds I work with every day, I’ve spent a good amount of time working on AWS organization and automation. Automated Lambda functions have helped with scheduled execution of code and sorting through S3.

It’s been really fun to keep up to date with the new technology coming out for LiDAR devices. The other day we had a visitor join us in the office!