New insights into high resolution DEM structural analysis with Coltop3D software

Modern measurement devices such a terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) systems allow for collecting tremendous amount of (x,y,z) points (up to 20 millions) within a few minutes. However, data analysis still may be impaired because of software limitations, which are usually not designed to handle such huge data sets. To overcome this shortcoming, a software – Coltop3D – was written from scratch. Coltop3D aims at providing the geosciences community a powerful tool to visually handle seamlessly large point clouds and large regular grids DEM, at allowing for straightforward visual analysis of the data with different colour scheme, and at providing specific geologist and/or geoscientist treatment methods such as structural analysis. The main features of Coltop3D are as follow: