One of the limitations of many terrestrial laser scanners is acquiring onboard photography that is representative of reality. This can be quite challenging and/or time consuming to achieve well – the main reasons are low resolution, poor exposure due to difficulties in obtaining accurate settings for a 360 degree scan, and the high chance of…

After several months using a pre-production Topcon GLS-2000 laser scanner, we now have a full production model and have used it on a couple of medium-sized projects already, as well as some interesting tests. As the hardware for collecting large clouds of point data become more and more similar, the focus (pardon the pun) is…

Cardiff Bay is a great place to capture a wide variety of historic and modern buildings. We’ve used this as a test for all our scanning hardware, so started off with the Pierhead Building. This was built in 1897 as the headquarters for the Bute Dock Company and remains one of the most spectacular structures in…

Laser scanning involves the collection of millions of accurate points from a single scan position. By ‘conventional surveying’ we refer to total station (TS) or GPS surveys where typically one or two operators are required to record individual points. Some of the advantages – from our point of view – of the scanning technique (also…