The utilisation of airborne laser scanning for mapping

Laser scanning has become the standard technique for the acquisition of digital elevation models. With the increasing point densities point clouds acquired by laser scanning have the potential to also become valuable data for the production of three-dimensional topographical databases. This paper discusses the possibilities to use airborne laser scanning for two tasks: change detection and semi-automated 3D mapping of urban environments. While laser scanning is demonstrated to be useful for detecting changes as well as mapping errors, the implementation of mapping rules to avoid false alarm errors needs to be improved. The creation of 3D city models with laser altimetry data in a semi-automated way is considered efficient. A higher level of automation seems to be feasible to further improve the efficiency of three-dimensional mapping.