Bricks are the vital component of most masonry structures. Their maintenance is critical to the protection of masonry buildings. Terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (TLidar) systems provide massive point cloud data in an accurate and fast way. TLidar enables us to sample and store the state of a brick surface in a practical way. This article aims to extract individual bricks from an unorganized pile of bricks sampled by a dense point cloud. The method automatically segments and models the individual bricks. The methodology is divided into five main steps: Filter needless points, brick boundary points removal, coarse segmentation using 3D component analysis, planar segmentation and grouping, and brick reconstruction. A novel voting scheme is used to segment the planar patches in an effective way. Brick reconstruction is based on the geometry of single brick and its corresponding nominal size (length, width and height). The number of bricks reconstructed is around 75%. An accuracy assessment is performed by comparing 3D coordinates of the reconstructed vertices to the manually picked vertices. The standard deviations of differences along x, y and z axes are 4.55 mm, 4.53 mm and 4.60 mm, respectively. The comparison results indicate that the accuracy of reconstruction based on the introduced methodology is high and reliable. The work presented in this paper provides a theoretical basis and reference for large scene applications in brick-like structures. Meanwhile, the high-accuracy brick reconstruction lays the foundation for further brick displacement estimation.

The use of a terrestrial laser scanner is examined to measure the changes of rock slopes subject to a wave attack test. Real scenarios are simulated in a water flume facility using a wave attack experiment representing a storm of 3000 waves. The stability of two rock slopes of different steepness was evaluated under the set conditions. For quantification of the changes of the slopes after the wave attack test, terrestrial laser scanning was used to acquire dense 3D point cloud data sampling for slope geometries before and after the wave attack experiment. After registration of the two scans, representing situations before and after the wave attack, the cloud-to-cloud distance was determined to identify areas in the slopes that were affected. Then, a range image technique was introduced to generate a raster image to facilitate a change analysis. Using these raster images, volume change was estimated as well. The results indicate that the area around the artificial coast line is most strongly affected by wave attacks. Another interesting phenomenon considers the change in transport direction of the rocks between the two slopes: from seaward transport for the steeper slope to landward transport for the milder slope. Using the range image technique, the work in this article shows that terrestrial laser scanning is an effective and feasible method for change analysis of long and narrow rock slopes.