Precise Registration of Laser Mapping Data by Planar Feature Extraction for Deformation Monitoring

Quantifying near-field displacements can help enable a better understanding of earthquake physics and hazards. To date, established remote sensing techniques have failed to recover subcentimeter-level near-field displacements at the scale and resolution required for shallow fault physical investigations. In this paper, methods are developed to rapidly extract planar parameters, using fast parallel approaches and an alternative registration approach is employed to automatically match the planes extracted from pairwise temporally spaced mobile laser scanning (MLS) and Airborne laser scanning (ALS) data sets along the Napa fault. The features extracted from two temporally spaced point clouds are then used to calculate rigid-body transformation parameters. The production of robust and accurate deformation maps requires the selection of appropriate planar feature extraction and feature mapping criteria. Rigorously propagated point accuracy estimates are employed to produce realistic estimated errors for the transformation parameters. Displacements of each aggregate study area are computed separately from left and right sides of the fault and compared to be within 3 mm of alinement array displacements. Local differential displacements show distinct patterns which, compared to alinement array measurements, were found to agree within the confidence bounds. The findings demonstrate the ability to accurately estimate near-field deformations from repeated MLS or ALS scans of earthquake-prone urban areas. ALS is also used in conjunction with the MLS data sets, illustrating the algorithm’s ability to accommodate different LiDAR collection modalities at subcentimeter-level accuracy. The automated planar extraction and registration is an important contribution to the study of near-field earthquake dynamics and can be used as input observations for future geological inversion models.