Integration of High-Resolution Imaging and Terrestrial Laser Scanner

Author: Yushin Ahn 

Point cloud data from laser scanner has a complementary property to imagery data such as surface information vs. texture information. Advance in technology has reached to the point where a camera mounted on top of a laser scanner can assign color directly from image pixels to 3D point clouds. Current terrestrial laser scanning system with camera on board uses digital image pixel (color) retrieval and Orthophoto generation, but the scanner camera is not fully utilized in terms of 3-dimensional measurement. For example, a target that is more than 100 meters from the system tends to experience a degraded image, spatial resolution-wise, while generating a sufficient number of points. It simply means image resolution is fixed while laser-scanning parameters are adjustable through scan rate, scan angle etc. The objective of this study is to incorporate a high-resolution imaging system to the laser scanning system so that color information is updated from high-resolution image.

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