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Assessment of terrestrial laser scanning technology for obtaining high‐resolution DEMs of soils
Author(s) -
Barneveld Robert Jan,
Seeger Manuel,
MaalenJohansen Ivar
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
earth surface processes and landforms
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.294
H-Index - 127
eISSN - 1096-9837
pISSN - 0197-9337
DOI - 10.1002/esp.3344
Subject(s) - digital elevation model , point cloud , remote sensing , elevation (ballistics) , laser scanning , environmental science , geology , soil water , lidar , viewpoints , soil science , laser , computer science , optics , mathematics , geometry , physics , computer vision , acoustics
Terrestrial Laser Scanners (TLS) provide a non‐contact method to measure soil microtopography of relatively large surface areas. The appropriateness of the technology in relatation to the derived Digital Elevation Models (DEM) however has not been reported. The suitability of TLS for soil microtopography measurements was tested on‐field for three large soil surface areas in agricultural fields. The acquired point clouds were filtered with a custom cloud import algorithm, and converted into digital elevation models (DEM) of different resolutions. To assess DEM quality, point clouds measured from different viewpoints were statistically compared. The statistical fit between point clouds from different viewpoints depends on spatial resolution of the DEM. The best results were obtained at the higher resolutions (0.02 to 0.04 cm), where less than 5 % of the grid cells showed significant differences between one viewpoint and the next ( p < 0.01). Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.