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...

Automatic registration of iPhone images to laser point clouds of urban structures using shape features

Fusion of 3D airborne laser (LIDAR) data and terrestrial optical imagery can be applied in 3D urban modeling and model up-dating. The most challenging aspect of the fusion procedure is registering the terrestrial optical images on the LIDAR point clouds. In this article, we propose an approach for registering these two different data from...

Hydrologic and cryospheric processes observed from space

Ten Dragon 3 projects deal with hydrologic and cryosphere processes, with a focus on the Himalayas and Qinghai – Tibet Plateau, but not limited to that. At the 1st Dragon 3 Progress Symposium in 2013 a significant potential for a better and deeper integration appeared very clearly and we worked out an overview of the ten projects identifying...

Evaluating voxel enabled scalable intersection of large point clouds

Laser scanning has become a well established surveying solution for obtaining 3D geo-spatial information on objects and environment. Nowadays scanners acquire up to millions of points per second which makes point cloud huge. Laser scanning is widely applied from airborne, carborne and stable platforms, resulting in point clouds obtained at...