AUTOMATIC SCENE CHANGE ANALYSIS OF LARGE AREAS

The paper presents a prototype of a portable system capable of acquiring on the fly 3D geometric data from a large installation. The system is mounted on a vehicle and integrates 3D laser scanners, high-resolution digital photography, video, GPS and possibly inertial navigation systems. Data is acquired while driving the vehicle and/or from different static scanning positions. The system includes software tools for the automatic correction of the vehicle movements. In addition tools were specific developed to handle the huge amount of data collected to reconstruct large areas. The paper presents the results of the described techniques applied to a large warehouse area where a large amount of scans were taken using the described vehicle borne laser scanner from which a model was created. It shows that it is possible in any time to redo a data acquisition from the same area without any assumptions of exact position, orientation or used scanner. Based on this new information it is possible to detect any changes in the buildings or any other type of modification.