Hinged, Pseudo-Grid Triangulation Method for Long, Near-Linear Cliff Analyses
Publication: Journal of Surveying Engineering
Volume 139, Issue 2
Abstract
Light detection and ranging (LIDAR) scanners can rapidly collect high-resolution, centimeter-level-accurate point clouds representing topography, suitable for change detection if scans are repeated over time. To perform meaningful volumetric change analyses, point clouds are commonly triangulated to produce continuous, digital terrain models (DTMs). However, DTM creation methods generally require a fixed-look direction tied to a specific plane, which results in less than ideal triangulations when modeling areas with largely varying topography, such as coastal cliffs and beaches. Furthermore, for accurate volumetric change analysis, surfaces must be free of intersecting triangles, have consistent facet-normal orientations, and be free of data gaps (holes). The methodology presented herein produces continuous surfaces without inconsistent normals and minimizes holes and self-intersections. The few intersecting triangles and holes may be quickly repaired using existing algorithms and were shown to be substantially less abundant compared with common surfacing techniques. Finally, the data structuring of this technique significantly shortens processing time, reduces memory requirements, and enables efficient and interactive visualization through both subsampling at varying scales and optimized-view frustum calculations.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by California Seagrant (Project No. R/OE-39), the Coastal Environmental Quality Initiative (CEQI No. 04-T-CEQI-06-0046), and the National Science Foundation (No. 0403433). Leica Geosystems and Maptek I-Site generously provided the software used in this study to aid in point-cloud processing and triangulation evaluation. Jessica Raymond, Pat Rentz, and Jillian Maloney assisted with the survey work. Neal Driscoll and Scott Ashford contributed to this study. MeshLab, a tool developed with the support of the 3D-CoForm project, and the GLC library (developed by Laurent Ribon) were used for this study. The writers thank the reviewers for their comments.
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© 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: May 28, 2012
Accepted: Dec 27, 2012
Published online: Dec 29, 2012
Published in print: May 1, 2013
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