High resolution survey for topographic surveying

In this decade, terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) is getting popular in many fields such as reconstruction, monitoring, surveying, as-built of facilities, archaeology, and topographic surveying. This is due the high speed in data collection which is about 50,000 to 1,000,000 three-dimensional (3D) points per second at high accuracy. The main advantage of 3D representation for the data is that it is more approximate to the real world. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to show the use of High-Definition Surveying (HDS), also known as 3D laser scanning for topographic survey. This research investigates the effectiveness of using terrestrial laser scanning system for topographic survey by carrying out field test in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Skudai, Johor. The 3D laser scanner used in this study is a Leica ScanStation C10. Data acquisition was carried out by applying the traversing method. In this study, the result for the topographic survey is under 1st class survey. At the completion of this study, a standard of procedure was proposed for topographic data acquisition using laser scanning systems. This proposed procedure serves as a guideline for users who wish to utilize laser scanning system in topographic survey fully.