The suitability of terrestrial laser scanning for building survey and mapping applications

Abstract

The popularity of Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) has been introduced into a field of surveying and has increased dramatically especially in producing the 3D model of the building. The used of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) is becoming rapidly popular because of its ability in several applications, especially the ability to observe complex documentation of complex building and observe millions of point cloud in three-dimensional in a short period. Users of building plan usually find it difficult to translate the traditional two-dimensional (2D) data on maps they see on a flat piece of paper to three-dimensional (3D). The TLS is able to record thousands of point clouds which contains very rich of geometry details and made the processing usually takes longer time. In addition, the demand of building survey work has made the surveyors need to obtain the data with full of accuracy and time saves. Therefore, the aim of this study is to study the limitation uses of TLS and its suitability for building survey and mapping. In this study, the efficiency of TLS Leica C10 for building survey was determined in term of its accuracy and comparing with Zeb-Revo Handheld Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) and the distometer. The accuracy for scanned data from both, TLS and MLS were compared with the Distometer by using root mean square error (RMSE) formula. Then, the 3D model of the building for both data, TLS and MLS were produced to analyze the visualization for different type of scanners. The software used; Autodesk Recap, Autodesk Revit, Leica Cyclone Software, Autocad Software and Geo Slam Software. The RMSE for TLS technique is 0.001 m meanwhile, RMSE for MLS technique is 0.007 m. The difference between these two techniques is 0.006 m. The 3D model of building for both models did not have too much different but the scanned data from TLS is much easier to process and generate the 3D model compared to scanned data from MLS. It is because the scanned data from TLS comes with an image, while none from MLS scanned data. There are limitations of TLS for building survey such as water and glass window but this study proved that acquiring data by TLS is better than using MLS.