Processing of laser scanner data—algorithms and applications
Section snippets
Background
Laser scanner systems available on the market are presently in a fairly mature state of art, where most of technical hardware difficulties and system integration problems have been solved. The systems are very complex, being more a `geodetic' system on the data acquisition part and more a `photogrammetric' system on the data processing part.
What very much remains is the development of algorithms and methods for interpretation and modelling of laser scanner data, resulting in useful
Laser scanners and laser scanner data
A laser scanning system produces data which can be characterised as sub-randomly distributed 3D point clouds. These point clouds may contain more information than a 2.5D surface model, in which the elevation has a unique z-value as a function of x and y. This means that vertical walls in certain cases can be seen as truly vertical, surface points beneath bridges can be measured and volumetric estimations of vegetation can be carried out. Elevation data can be acquired with different attributes
Processing of laser scanner data
The processing of laser scanner data often aims at either removing unwanted measurements, either in the form of erroneous measurements or objects, or modelling data given a specific model. Removing unwanted measurements, as in the case of finding a ground surface from a mixture of ground and vegetation measurements, is in this context referred to as filtering. The unwanted measurements can, depending on application, be characterised as noise, outliers or gross errors. Finding a specific
Discussion
The usefulness of airborne laser scanner systems has been shown by other authors in a number of applications where the generation of DEMs with traditional photogrammetric methods fail or become too expensive, e.g., DEMs over areas with dense vegetation (Kraus and Pfeifer, 1998) or 3D City Models (Haala et al., 1997). High quality DEMs with sampling distances of 0.25–2 m are provided, depending on the application and system, within a short time limit.
The limitation of laser scanner systems lies
Acknowledgements
Data and help provided by SAAB Survey Systems are highly appreciated.
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