A Fusion Method Using Terrestrial Laser Scanning and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Photogrammetry for Landslide Deformation Monitoring Under Complex Terrain Conditions

Abstract

Landslides are one of the major factors threatening human life and social development. Monitoring and early warning of landslides are important parts of disaster prevention and control. However, due to complex terrain conditions, landslide monitoring in mountainous watersheds and high mountain valleys usually faces issues of high difficulty, high danger, poor data integrity and low data accuracy compared with plains or hilly areas. Based on the fusion of terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry, this paper proposes a landslide deformation monitoring method that can be applied to complex terrain conditions where there are access restrictions and blind areas. The method is based on TLS to increase the number and range of ground control points (GCPs) of UAVs within the visual range and then uses assumed control points (ACPs) to reconstruct the UAV model and calculate landslide displacement in invisible areas. In addition, this paper proposes and verifies a formula based on an allometricl equation to estimate the error between the calculated and real displacements based on this method. Then, we applied this method to a real landslide case and successfully realized landslide monitoring under the conditions of access limitation and blind areas. The proposed method enables landslide monitoring to overcome terrain restrictions, and it makes it possible to perform large-scale and high-precision ground deformation measurements with limited working ranges, which can be an effective tool for landslide monitoring in emergency situations and long-term risk evaluation.