The Digital Surveyor: bringing 3D reconstruction to your doorstep

Surveying –the science of determining the position of points and objects– has been around since the beginning of recorded history. The advent of powerful computing has revolutionized the rather conservative surveying world, widened its scope and popularized the domain of geo-spatial engineering. Applications such as GPS-navigation, Google Earth or Street-view are publicly adapted. Traditional surveying research has now become a wide, multi-disciplinary field, commonly referred to as Geomatics. The art of obtaining accurate and complete positional information is still an important aspect of Geomatics research and has undergone important changes in the last decade as well. Laser scanners have become affordable and photogrammetry –traditionally a playground for experts processing aerial imagery– now yields 3D models from close-range images, taken on the ground or with drones. In this lecture I will explain how these different techniques have their respective pros and cons and how a combination of them can lead to better, faster and more reliable results. Furthermore I will go into different application fields that can benefit from the aforementioned recent advances, focusing on obtaining 3D information from existing environments. Examples will be given for civil construction (as-built Scan-To-BIM), heritage conservation, photogrammetric methods for asset management and a combination of techniques for security and surveillance.status: publishe