The new laser scanning technology has really made a breakthrough. People are starting to use laser scanners in more and more areas: scanning from airplanes or helicopters, ground-level scanning of both horizontal and vertical surfaces, as well as mobile scanning. With more and more scanned data, the need to process and use these volumes of data, known as point clouds, has increased dramatically. Adtollo has developed a point cloud module in Topocad that processes very high volumes of scanned points, along with a number of tools and functions that make it possible to process and work with point clouds.
”Traditionally, the best you could do was to look at scans as 3D images using certain limited tools in order to be able to process information in point clouds. What we have done is partly to create functions for looking at point clouds in three dimensions, with colours and intensity. But also making it possible to process point clouds instead of and together with terrain models in Topocad. This means that we can create terrain profiles, cross sections, perform volume calculations, create elevation curves, improve two-dimensional maps into three dimensions, and much more besides,” explains Tomas Sandström, Business Area Manager at Surveying & Mapping, Adtollo.
”We quickly developed a totally separate algorithm to create an intelligent way of filtering out points from point clouds. Partly because many point clouds still contain too many points, but in particular incorrect points. We’re continuing to look at various filtering options, which we’ll be integrating into Topocad. We’ve also created a function that enables the user to process point clouds directly in Topocad’s drawing/map. Using both import to the drawing or as an external reference. This means that you can add one or more point clouds together with other three-dimensional data in order to compare or draw,” continues Tomas Sandström.
Point clouds have been available as a module in Topocad for more than a year, but in connection with the release of Topocad version 14, a number of functions have been added, in particular for 3D processing.
”We’re now just waiting for the launch of our 3D map engine TC5D, in which we’ll be able to publish point clouds on the Internet, in three dimensions and with no supplementary program. This will be another boost for the use of scanning in our efforts to depict reality,” concludes Tomas Sandström.

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