An Object-Oriented Software Development Approach to Design Simulator for Airborne Altimetric Lidar

Topographic data are fundamental for several applications. The latest technique for topographic data collection is Airborne Altimetric LiDAR. However, LiDAR data is not available for research and education as required. This paper describes the object oriented design methods used to develop a software system to simulate the functioning of an airborne altimetric LiDAR instrument. The objective is to model functions of a LiDAR instrument by using object oriented software development approach so that the developed software could be maintainable, reliable and scalable. The object-oriented software development processes, viz., object - oriented analysis, object-oriented design and object-oriented programming have been done to realize the software. The simulator is conceived with three components, namely terrain component, sensor component and trajectory component.