New technologies power geospatial solutions in public safety

Every year U.S. cities host major events that garner national and international attention. In 2020, for example, Miami will host Super Bowl LIV, while Milwaukee, Wis., and Charlotte, N.C., will host the Democratic National Convention and Republican National Convention, respectively. 

For large publicly attended events, situational awareness is one of the main challenges for emergency responders. Understanding the physical landscape and infrastructure at or around the event grounds can be challenging if they lack the geospatial technologies to help them prepare and respond to public safety breaches, ultimately saving lives and property. 

What should public safety officials, who are responsible for the evaluation and selection of technology solutions, keep in mind when preparing for large scale events? How can they predict where an active shooter may hide or select the best entry and exit points for attendees in case of a fire? What's involved with moving emergency responder resources and assets through crowds?  

Local governments can greatly improve their response times for these events by implementing advanced location intelligence solutions ahead of time. We will explore three suggestions here, related to terrestrial LiDAR capture, indoor mapping and points of interest.

Terrestrial LiDAR capture

Terrestrial LiDAR creates a 3D representation of an area that helps officials understand the landscape around major event locations, including routes to and from these venues. While many current situational awareness capabilities are tied to the road network, terrestrial  LiDAR expands that insight to the surrounding landscape and buildings so officials can determine the best routes and quickly see whether buildings or blockades -- such as vehicle or pedestrian traffic -- might delay emergency response. The data also enables 3D simulations, where emergency responders can study the surroundings in and around an event to assess where threats would occur, move or terminate. 

Terrestrial LiDAR can be captured from camera systems mounted on top of automobiles. Agencies should look for solutions that create point clouds up to 75 meters in any direction from the vehicle and have accompanying 360-degree imagery captured with a multicamera system. This combination gives users a detailed 3D view of any landscape up to 10 stories high, which will deliver a more realistic rendering.

Another consideration is data formatting. LiDAR data should be in .LAS files so it is accessible to LiDAR viewing software to depict and analyze data faster. Finally, merging terrestrial LiDAR with aerial LiDAR and satellite imagery will create a complete digital twin of the area of interest for the ultimate solution in situational awareness.

Because it is difficult to capture road coverage at scale, city and state governments should seek an available, extensive library of LiDAR content and a partner that can continuously update data for maintenance and custom applications. 

Indoor mapping

Responders also need situational awareness indoors. A firefighter responding to a conflagration in a large public venue must know all possible entrances for evacuating the building and rescuing people. However, pinpointing locations and plotting routes inside buildings is often difficult and error prone. Few digital indoor maps exist today, and those that do often don't enable indoor routing. Indoor routing networks that underpin seamless point-to-point mapping can provide maps, navigation, data.  Agencies should look for a  customizable solution that digitizes building floor plans at scale, integrating computer-aided design output and other indoor renderings.

Also, the map should accommodate updates in near real time through self-service editing tools or by submitting a change to a partner or the indoor mapping vendor.

Points of interest (POI)

Dynamic points of interest such as local landmarks provide critical information for emergency responders, delivering better information than traditional content many governments use.  POI solutions enhance decision-making by delivering data as a service, fresher content and greater  attribution. In fact, a complete POI database speeds response time to 911 callers who only knows their location by POI names.  To ensure the ongoing freshness and accuracy of such data, agencies should look for a partner that leverages cloud services to enable real-time ingestion and processing of new and content-rich data.

Simply put: Decisions should be informed by a wealth of fresh POI information, which is only available with improved technology. Traditional POI verification is done manually; it's costly, and it does not scale. Machine-learning verification removes the manual phone call or internet research to verify POI data, achieving replication and scale.  Web harvesting can validate sources, and deep learning models also detect front doors, signage and house numbers from the street level imagery collected from LiDAR-scans.  Furthermore, automated source validation helps confirm whether a new source record is a real place and helps identify closed businesses.

Public safety IT managers can have a material impact on the emergency responders' ability to prepare for, respond to and recover from emergency situations. By implementing any or all of the aforementioned location intelligence solutions, they reassure the public they serve of their commitment to safety during large scale events. 2020 is just around the corner; is your city prepared?