Quality Assessment of 3D Point Clouds on the Different Surface Materials Generated from iPhone LiDAR Sensor

Abstract

Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) is a powerful device that can capture 3D reality faster than ever before. For more industry nowadays, this equipment assists a lot in analyzing issues from artifacts, structures, buildings, and landscapes at required accuracy and precision depending on the applications. Nonetheless, the costs and complexity of TLS in many fields remain high. With the invention of the iPhone 12 Pro’s new Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor, and the increased capability of the iPhone’s camera array system, the generation of 3D point clouds using this sensor led to several studies on their capability and resulting accuracy for some applications in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industries, especially in planning and decision-making purposes towards 3D reconstructed model. Generally, this 3D model is incorporated from different surface materials which have different results when scanning via laser scanning platform. Therefore, several tests were conducted on the iPhone 12 Pro at different surface materials (e.g., plywood, aluminium, canvas, plastic board, and ceramic tile), where the density of 3D point clouds and accuracy of distance measurements generated by iPhone 12 Pro were used as the parameters of quality assessment while comparison to TLS served as reference data. The 3D scanning sessions on different object materials were carried out in a small classroom, approximately 100m2 where each object has its specific dimension and being placed side by side with each other. According to the test outcomes, the LiDAR sensor of iPhone 12 Pro was able to generate a good density of 3D point clouds which produced proximate value of actual object dimensions using meshing process in CloudCompare Software. Therefore, it can be seen that the output of 3D model generated from iPhone LiDAR Sensor is sufficed to replicate the 3D indoor building environment at small coverage area.