Abstract
Abstract. Recent years showed a gradual transition from terrestrial to aerial survey thanks to the development of UAV and sensors for it. Many sectors benefited by this change among which geological one; drones are flexible, cost-efficient and can support outcrops surveying in many difficult situations such as inaccessible steep and high rock faces. The experiences acquired in terrestrial survey, with total stations, GNSS or terrestrial laser scanner (TLS), are not yet completely transferred to UAV acquisition. Hence, quality comparisons are still needed. The present paper is framed in this perspective aiming to evaluate the quality of the point clouds generated by an UAV in a geological context; data analysis was conducted comparing the UAV product with the homologous acquired with a TLS system. Exploiting modern semantic classification, based on eigenfeatures and support vector machine (SVM), the two point clouds were compared in terms of density and mutual distance. The UAV survey proves its usefulness in this situation with a uniform density distribution in the whole area and producing a point cloud with a quality comparable with the more traditional TLS systems.
Highlights
Geomatics is intimately connected with environmental surveying and monitoring and is becoming increasingly used in geosciences for digitization of outcrops; once this is accomplished, enhanced segmentation techniques can be applied to select, and measure selected features
The present paper aims to evaluate the quality of the point clouds generated by laser and by a UAV system to evaluate the shape and spatial distribution of calcite concretions developed within the sandprone fill of a turbidite channel (Marini et al, 2019)
Even if the UAV surveys were related to a larger area, only the outcrop zone was considered. This choice has a double reason: considered only the part related to the outcrop that was effectively measured by the two technologies, UAV and terrestrial laser scanner (TLS), and reduce the computational effort
Summary
Geomatics is intimately connected with environmental surveying and monitoring and is becoming increasingly used in geosciences for digitization of outcrops; once this is accomplished, enhanced segmentation techniques can be applied to select, and measure selected features. This type of surveying is performed from the ground with topographic total stations and GNSS receivers and consisted in the measurement of a necessarily limited set of points; these systems have gradually given way to laser scanners (Buckley et al, 2008). The terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) has the capability to measure thousands of points with a density and an accuracy that has become increasingly higher over last years. There are some impediments: the presence of elements, like bushes and trees, that introduce perspective obstructions and can hinder the instrument placements, and the complexity of the survey when the extension and the shape of the outcrops need many stations
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