Low-cost versus high-end systems for automated 3D data acquisition

The authors investigated three different systems and methods for digital surface model (DSM) generation and compared the achieved datasets against a reference dataset. Due to the long grass and vegetation, the mean deviations in height against the reference dataset were up to 30cm. Additional filtering of the datasets slightly improved the results, but could not eliminate the differences. Overall, the p3d systems dataset was evaluated to be the best one, followed by static laser scanning and UAS photogrammetry. Taking into account the time spent on data acquisition and processing, with a workload of five hours the kinematic TLS and the UAS photogrammetry are much more efficient methods than the static TLS which has a workload of 25 hours. It has to be assumed that in the case of less vegetation the UAS-generated data could obtain a similar quality in comparison to the kinematic TLS. Due to the low system costs, UASs are an alternative solution to static and mobile laser scanning. However, the slightly better results in this investigation were achieved by a high-end system costing approximately EUR 150,000, which might be an exclusion criterion for many applications.