NIST Point Cloud City - Hancock County, MS

 

The work to develop these datasets was performed under the following financial assistance award 70NANB18H249 from U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology.

 

Indoor mapping is the next big frontier for the geospatial field. Lack of adequate indoor maps is a well-documented public safety issue reasserted with each building fire, earthquake, mass shooting, and other tragedies. While technology exists capable of mapping buildings, very few standards and best practices are available to create reliable, affordable, and consistent indoor maps.

 

The 2018 NIST Public Safety Innovation Accelerator Program awareded a grant to Hancock County, Mississippi as one of three teams nationwide to generate an extensive catalog of annotated 3D indoor point clouds that can be used by industry, academia, and government to advance research and development in the areas of indoor mapping, localization and navigation for public safety, as well as to demonstrate the potential value of ubiquitous indoor positioning and location-based information. These pioneering U.S. state and local governments will created a model ‘Point Cloud City’ and also participated in the NIST Global Cities Team Challenge initiative as the lead for an Action Cluster. PSCR funded over $750K in new awards for this research and development.

 

Hancock County engaged local geospatial contractor NVision Solutions Inc. to assist with the project which was completed in Sep. 2020. The following information documents the project outcomes.  This information will migrate to the Mississippi Automated Resource Information System.

 

The project data is available for download at http://nist.nvisionsolutions.com.  This document describes the 3D data formats and attribute informmation: http://nist.nvisionsolutions.com/Data%20Documentation.pdf.

 

Information on all three NIST teams can be found here: https://www.nist.gov/ctl/pscr/funding-opportunities/past-funding-opportunities/psiap-point-cloud-city