Had to pick between laser scanning and photogrammetry for a site survey

I've got a 40-acre site in Austin that needs a topo map and I was torn between using a Leica RTC360 or just flying a drone with photogrammetry. Ended up going with the laser scanner because the tree canopy was too thick for good aerial shots. The scan data came out super clean but processing took over 12 hours on my laptop. Has anyone else run into that kind of turnaround time with heavy point clouds?

3 comments

3 Comments

brooket439d ago

Oh man, 12 hours is rough but not surprising with that much canopy data. My buddy tried photogrammetry under heavy trees and ended up with a map that looked like Swiss cheese.

betty_perry248d ago

Oh wow, 12 hours is a beast but honestly I'd take that over patchy photogrammetry any day. Did you mess with the registration settings at all or just let it run default? I'm wondering if you could have cut that time by splitting the scans into smaller chunks and merging them later. Just curious if you tried any optimization tricks or if it was a straight export situation.

ivan_harris9d ago

Yeah but 12 hours isn't that bad for a full 40 acres with heavy canopy. The RTC360 spits out crazy detail so your laptop was probably struggling with the noise and raw data. You could have saved some time by lowering the scan resolution a bit or cropping out edges you don't need before processing. Also make sure you're not running the software off an external hard drive - that killed me on my first big job. The scan quality under trees is way better than photogrammetry though so you made the right call even if it took all night.