Automated Determination of the Volume of Loose Engineering Deposits Using Terrestrial Laser Scanning

A new method for automatic volume determination of loose engineering deposits (LEDs) using point clouds collected by terrestrial laser scanning is proposed. The method starts with a problem of lacking bottom surface point clouds when scanning LEDs, assuming that the bottom surface is flat, a spatial plane is generated based on the plane fitting to the bottom surface. Then the sample point cloud is projected on this fitted plane to construct the subface point clouds, which, together with the initial point cloud data, are stitched into complete point cloud data with good closure, integrity, and accuracy. The 3D surface model established by introducing the alpha shape algorithm calculates the volume, and the validation experiments on three soil mound models and one field experiment on LEDs with a minimum average error of only 1.69% fully validate the effectiveness and accuracy of the method. The encouraging results show that effective volume calculation can be performed on realistic LEDs using the proposed method.