Automatic estimation of excavation volume from laser mobile mapping data for mountain road widening

Roads play an indispensable role as part of the infrastructure of society. In recent years, society has witnessed the rapid development of laser mobile mapping systems (LMMS) which, at high measurement rates, acquire dense and accurate point cloud data. This paper presents a way to automatically estimate the required excavation volume when...

Parameterization of Surface Roughness Based on ICESat/GLAS Full Waveforms: A Case Study on the Tibetan Plateau

Glaciers in the Tibetan mountains are expected to be sensitive to turbulent sensible and latent heat fluxes. One of the most significant factors of the energy exchange between the atmospheric boundary layer and the glacier is the roughness of the glacier surface. However, methods to parameterize this roughness for glacier surfaces in remote...

SkelTre: Robust skeleton extraction from imperfect point clouds

Terrestrial laser scanners capture 3D geometry of real world objects as a point cloud. This paper reports on a new algorithm developed for the skeletonization of a laser scanner point cloud. The skeletonization algorithm proposed in this paper consists of three steps: (i) extraction of a graph from an octree organization, (ii) reduction of the...

Validating time series of a combined GPS and MERIS Integrated Water Vapor product

Increased knowledge of atmospheric water vapor can improve weather predictions and is expected to reduce errors in products derived from GPS and (In)SAR data. At GPS ground stations Integrated Water Vapor (IWV) is estimated from the GPS signal delay with a high temporal resolution. The Envisat MERIS spectrometer obtains spatially dense IWV...

ICESat Full-Waveform Altimetry Compared to Airborne Laser Scanning Altimetry Over The Netherlands

Since 2003, the full-waveform laser altimetry system onboard NASA's Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) has acquired a worldwide elevation database. ICESat data are widely applied for change detection of ice sheet mass balance, forest structure estimation, and digital terrain model generation of remote areas. ICESat's measurements...

Incidence angle influence on the quality of terrestrial laser scanning points

A terrestrial laser scanner measures the distance to an object with a precision in the order of millimeters. The quality of each single point in a point cloud affects post-processing applications, such as deformation analysis or 3D modeling. The quality of a scan point is influenced by four major factors: instrument calibration, atmospheric...

Skeleton-based botanic tree diameter estimation from dense LiDAR data

New airborne LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) measurement systems, like the FLI-MAP 400 System, make it possible to obtain high density data containing far more information about single objects, like trees, than traditional airborne laser systems. Therefore, it becomes feasible to analyze geometric properties of trees on the individual object...

SkelTre – fast skeletonisation for imperfect point cloud data of botanic trees

Icesat full waveform altimetry compared to airborne laser altimetry over the Netherlands

Since 2003 the spaceborne laser altimetry system on board of NASA’s Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) has acquired a large world-wide database of full waveform data organized in 15 products. In this research three products are evaluated over The Netherlands. For this purpose the raw full waveform product, the derived Gaussian...