Point Cloud Based Road Surface Modelling and Assessment

Abstract

Creating digital twins of the built environment based on point clouds broadens its application area; point clouds of buildings support BIM (Building Information Modeling) while the digital twins of road surfaces support transportation applications. Point clouds acquired by current TLS (Terrestrial Laser Scanning) or by MLS (Mobile Laser Scanning) systems represent the road surface with high accuracy, and resolution (i.e. with small point spacing). In particular applications extreme high accuracy and robustness is required; the paper discusses surveying and assessment of vehicle test track, including a braking platform. Both the surveying method (TLS supported by Total Station measurements) and the data processing workflow are presented. The potential evaluation results are discussed in detail; semi-automatically created 2D sections and deviation maps shows how the current state of the pavement differs from the as-designed geometry. The investigations proved that point-cloud based data acquisition methods enable deriving high accuracy and high-resolution road surface models.