Geo Week News

February 18, 2016

HXGN Acquired Single-Photon LiDAR Provider SigmaSpace

Hexagon AB has announced its acquisition of Washington, DC-based company SigmaSpace Corporation.

SigmaSpace is a provider of single-photon aerial LiDAR services. The company markets single-photon LiDAR as having multiple advantages over conventional LiDAR. As SigmaSpace explains on its website, single-photon LiDAR operates with very high efficiency and “offers more 3D mapping capability in terms of swath, spatial resolution, acquisition time and density of range returns.” The technology promises higher aerial collection speeds and denser data than conventional systems.

Hexagon’s official statement positions the acquisition as a move to shore up their content-as-a-service offering, which President and CEO Ola Rollén calls the Imagery Programme.

“The capabilities offered by SigmaSpace nicely complement our current technologies and will positively impact our Imagery Programme – which makes quality geospatial imagery, captured with our airborne sensors, available through the cloud,” says Rollén. “Additionally, the need for photorealistic 3D visualizations of the world around us is here to stay, especially in light of the of semi- and fully-autonomous vehicle era.”

Using single-photon LiDAR to map large swaths of land would give HXGN a fast means of capturing dense data, which could then could be processed into fit-for-purpose deliverables for each individual customer of their cloud service.

SigmaSpace’s products and offerings will benefit from the acquisition as well.

Assuming that all single-photon LiDAR sensors gather data that is roughly equivalent density and quality for customer purposes, providers can differentiate themselves by their deliverables. As a result, SigmaSpace’s technology appears to gain a competitive edge by gaining access to Hexagon’s broad ecosystem of data processing and visualization technologies.

HXGN reports that SigmaSpace is now positively contributing to the company’s earnings. The terms of the acquisition are not available.

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