How to Efficiently Determine the Range Precision of 3D Terrestrial Laser Scanners.

As laser scanning technology has improved a lot in recent years, terrestrial laser scanners (TLS) have become popular devices for surveying tasks with high accuracy demands, such as deformation analyses. For this reason, finding a stochastic model for TLS measurements is very important in order to get statistically reliable results. The measurement accuracy of laser scanners-especially of their rangefinders-is strongly dependent on the scanning conditions, such as the scan configuration, the object surface geometry and the object reflectivity.

Strategy for Determining the Stochastic Distance Characteristics of the 2D Laser Scanner Z + F Profiler 9012A with Special Focus on the Close Range.

Kinematic laser scanning with moving platforms has been used for the acquisition of 3D point clouds of our environment for many years. A main application of these mobile systems is the acquisition of the infrastructure, e.g.

Terrestrial Laser Scanner Two-Face Measurements for Analyzing the Elevation-Dependent Deformation of the Onsala Space Observatory 20-m Radio Telescope's Main Reflector in a Bundle Adjustment.

For accurate astronomic and geodetic observations based on radio telescopes, the elevation-dependent deformation of the radio telescopes' main reflectors should be known. Terrestrial laser scanning has been used for determining the corresponding changes of focal lengths and areal reflector deformations at several occasions before. New in this publication is the situation in which we minimize systematic measurement errors by an improved measurement and data-processing concept: Sampling the main reflector in both faces of the laser scanner and calibrating the laser scanner in situ in a bundle adjustment.

Towards System Calibration of Panoramic Laser Scanners from a Single Station.

Terrestrial laser scanner measurements suffer from systematic errors due to internal misalignments. The magnitude of the resulting errors in the point cloud in many cases exceeds the magnitude of random errors. Hence, the task of calibrating a laser scanner is important for applications with high accuracy demands.