TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNING FOR AREA BASED DEFORMATION ANALYSIS OF TOWERS AND WATER DAMNS

Laserscanners have so far not frequently been used for high precision engineering geodesy measurement tasks, such as deformation monitoring, since the technical specifications of most laserscanners do not fulfil the accuracy requirements in such applications. The paper describes methods which allow for the use of laserscanners in this field. The methods are based on the analysis of highly redundant unstructured point clouds which represent the surface of objects. The precision potential in these applications is not limited by the single point accuracy of laserscanners, since surface elements derived from a large number of points are used for deformation analysis. The practical example presented here is the determination of the bending line of a television tower. Finally an outlook on future work - the analysis of deformations on water dams - will be shown.