2096 - Explain the principles of terrestrial laser scanning operation and discuss its applications

Explain the principles of terrestrial laser scanning operation and discuss its applications

Concepts

  • [PS2-3-2] Terrestrial Laser Scanning
    A terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) system is a stationary highly accurate ranging device for geodetic surveying. More specifically, TLS systems provide dense and accurate 3D point cloud data for the local environment and they may also reliably measure distances of several tens of meters. Due to these capabilities, such TLS systems are commonly used for applications such as city modeling, indoor modeling, construction surveying, deformation analysis, scene interpretation, urban accessibility analysis, or the digitization of cultural heritage objects. When using a TLS system, each captured TLS scan is represented in the form of a 3D point cloud consisting of a large number of scanned 3D points and, optionally, additional attributes for each 3D point such as color or intensity information. However, a TLS system represents a line-of-sight instrument and hence occlusions resulting from objects in the scene may be expected as well as a significant variation in point density between close and distant object surfaces. Thus, a single scan might not be sufficient in order to obtain a dense and (almost) complete 3D acquisition of interesting parts of a scene and, consequently, multiple scans have to be acquired from different locations. As each scan refers to the local coordinate system of the TLS system, all acquired scans have to be appropriately aligned in a common coordinate system. For this purpose, the respective 3D transformations between the acquired scans have to be estimated and this process is commonly referred to as point cloud registration, point set registration, or 3D scan matching.