Glacier mass balance in the Nyainqentanglha mountains between 2000 and 2017 retrieved from ZiYuan-3 stereo images and the SRTM DEM

Mountain glaciers are excellent indicators of climate change and have an important role in the terrestrial water cycle and food security in many parts of the world. Glaciers are the major water source of rivers and lakes in the Nyainqentanglha Mountains (NM) region, where the glacier area has the second largest extent on the Tibetan Plateau....

Coarse point cloud registration by EGI matching of voxel clusters

Laser scanning samples the surface geometry of objects efficiently and records versatile information as point clouds. However, often more scans are required to fully cover a scene. Therefore, a registration step is required that transforms the different scans into a common coordinate system. The registration of point clouds is usually conducted...

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...

Geometric road runoff estimation from laser mobile mapping data

Mountain roads are the lifelines of remote areas but are often situated in complicated settings and prone to landslides, rock fall, avalanches and damages due to surface water runoff. The impact and likelihood of these types of hazards can be partly assessed by a detailed geometric analysis of the road environment. Field measurements in...

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...

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...

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...

SkelTre - Fast Skeletonisation for Imperfect Point Cloud Data of Botanic Trees

Terrestrial laser scanners capture 3D geometry as a point cloud. This paper reports on a new algorithm aiming at the skeletonisation of a laser scanner point cloud, representing a botanical tree without leafs. The resulting skeleton can subsequently be applied to obtain tree parameters like length and diameter of branches for botanic...

Applications for point cloud skeletonizations in forestry and agriculture

In recent years, both airborne and terrestrial laser scanning developed to a standard technique for acquiring information on terrestrial landscapes. Here forest inventory and orchard management is considered. Inventory and parameterization of individual trees in orchards and forests are of large interest in nowadays society because of the...