The "Death of Laser Scanning"?

I understand the desire to "posture" a dissertation from a certain perspective, especially in a blog. One is faced with a space and word count constraint that limits the verbiage.

What strikes me as humorous is his hyperbole of "What great leaps and bounds have we seen from vendors since 2010 though?" As if a span of three or four years is a great gauge of a product or instrument's use in our profession. It seems as though he's predicting the death of laser scanning because no one has come up with a "new and improved" for that three or four year span.

We work with optical instruments that were invented 400 years ago. Most surveyors didn't work regularly with reflective distance measurement until the early or middle eighties, even though they had been around for twenty years. Same with satellite positioning.

While I agree with the gent in that the software is the big sale point of laser scanners, I whole-heartedly disagree with his assessment that laser scanning is passé.

Anything that collects that many points in so little time is good. Mainly because we are in the business of selling precise data. The more data, the more money. And that above all else drives professions and industries.

I agree that the technology is not dead by a long shot and that software RIGHT NOW is the bottleneck for the industry. But it is food for thought. I don't think Laser Scanning as we currently know it is ever going to go away completely. It may morph into something of a different flavor or have a different case, but I think there will always be some sort of need for a traditional surveying based laser scanning method. That being said, the Google Tango project looks really cool and will definitely be interesting to see how that develops over the years and is integrated into a Surveyors workflow.

We don't own a scanner and I'm certainly not schilling for Leica, but his assertion that the Faro Focus does the same thing as a Leica C10 is flat out wrong. I've seen the results firsthand of a head-to-head comparison of the two; the C10 data was much cleaner. It's like saying that my Ford Fusion is the same thing as a Mercedes Benz - the Fusion is a nice car that will get you where you're going, but it's not the same thing.

Have seen this song and dance before. With EDM it was "You will not be able to buy a steel tape in a few years." With data collectors "You will not be able to buy a field book in a few years." Total stations were going to totally replace angle only transits/theodolites, etc. etc. etc. and on and on. Each tool has a place in what we do and there are overlaps in capability.

Our real job is to select the best tool to solve a specific problem. This usually means one size does not fit or provide equal value in all applications.

> We don't own a scanner and I'm certainly not schilling for Leica, but his assertion that the Faro Focus does the same thing as a Leica C10 is flat out wrong. I've seen the results firsthand of a head-to-head comparison of the two; the C10 data was much cleaner. It's like saying that my Ford Fusion is the same thing as a Mercedes Benz - the Fusion is a nice car that will get you where you're going, but it's not the same thing.

As someone who's company performs scans on a daily/weekly basis I couldn't agree more. The focus has it's place but it's certainly not a C10.

> Total stations were going to totally replace angle only transits/theodolites

With rare exceptions, this has already come to pass in the survey world. (In the construction world, maybe less so.) I'm not aware of any production surveying activities that use angle-only instruments.

I was delighted to have the opportunity recently to do some elevation transfers across a river using my T2000 to turn simultaneous reciprocal zenith angles. But the only other job I've used it on since buying it (for a song!) 5 or so years ago was an antenna alignment project, and I only used it on that one because I wanted to give it some exercise.

I'll take the prediction one step further and say that robotic total stations are going to replace all but a very small percentage of the manual models.

> > Total stations were going to totally replace angle only transits/theodolites
>
> With rare exceptions, this has already come to pass in the survey world. (In the construction world, maybe less so.) I'm not aware of any production surveying activities that use angle-only instruments.
>
> I was delighted to have the opportunity recently to do some elevation transfers across a river using my T2000 to turn simultaneous reciprocal zenith angles. But the only other job I've used it on since buying it (for a song!) 5 or so years ago was an antenna alignment project, and I only used it on that one because I wanted to give it some exercise.
>
> I'll take the prediction one step further and say that robotic total stations are going to replace all but a very small percentage of the manual models.

:good: :good: That is a very accurate assessment.

> We don't own a scanner and I'm certainly not schilling for Leica, but his assertion that the Faro Focus does the same thing as a Leica C10 is flat out wrong. I've seen the results firsthand of a head-to-head comparison of the two; the C10 data was much cleaner. It's like saying that my Ford Fusion is the same thing as a Mercedes Benz - the Fusion is a nice car that will get you where you're going, but it's not the same thing.

Absolutely, I tried them both extensively and the C10 is a Survey instrument, the Faro is an Architectural/Crime Scene tool. Both have their place but for Surveying applications there is no comparison.

Ralph

Have you done any evaluation of the new Faro?

http://www2.faro.com/site/resources/share/2244

We're just staring to compare data sets from it to the C10 and P20 we've previously used, but initially I like the looks of it for about 3/4 of the applications I use a scanner for.

Hi all, I am the author of the piece in discussion here and read all comments with great interest.

I shall attempt to respond to key points raised in the discussion above and try to expand upon was originally written if needed.
I agree with the overall sentiment that laser scanning is indeed not dead. That was probably a poor choice of title on my part for the content I had written.
It seems that the title has drawn too much focus rather than the content, which I believe I am well placed (certainly here in the UK)to make the comments that I have done. If you have time, I respectfully ask that you read the content again and try to look beyond the title.

> What strikes me as humorous is his hyperbole of "What great leaps and bounds have we seen from vendors since 2010 though?" As if a span of three or four years is a great gauge of a product or instrument's use in our profession. It seems as though he's predicting the death of laser scanning because no one has come up with a "new and improved" for that three or four year span.

Whilst 4 years may not be long in our life span and even less in our industry, where the rapid pace of technology evolution is concerned, it is half a lifetime.
Would you replace a total station 4 yearts after purchase, probably not. Would you replace it after 8 years of use? Quite possibly. Technology generally advances so that we can improve our productivity. Having a piece of kit 8+ years old would usually place us at a distinct disadvantage in the market.

Whilst I certainly was not predicting the death of laser scanning because nothing has improved massively in 4 years, I do think we are nearing a plateau and a decline will start soon unless there is true innovation soon.

> We work with optical instruments that were invented 400 years ago. Most surveyors didn't work regularly with reflective distance measurement until the early or middle eighties, even though they had been around for twenty years. Same with satellite positioning.

Take satellite positionaing as an example. What was once the domain of professional surveyors is now in everyones pocket, car and many machines on site.
This of course is not mm (sorry, I'm European!) accurate like a surveyor would require, it is a great example of the democrotisation of a survey technology.

I see laser scanning and data capture heading the same way eventually.
With the advent of cloud computing, wi-fi, 4g and even 5g etc in the future, there will come a time in the medium term when these technologies all play a part in crowd sourced data collection playing a big part in the digital capture of our world.
Whilst this certainly won't be immediately as accurate to cause "us" concern, it is something we should certainly monitor and look to include in our work flows and deliverables.

> While I agree with the gent in that the software is the big sale point of laser scanners, I whole-heartedly disagree with his assessment that laser scanning is passé.

Whilst not strictly passé yet, it is very close to becoming the norm for many types of survey work.

> I agree that the technology is not dead by a long shot and that software RIGHT NOW is the bottleneck for the industry. But it is food for thought. I don't think Laser Scanning as we currently know it is ever going to go away completely. It may morph into something of a different flavor or have a different case, but I think there will always be some sort of need for a traditional surveying based laser scanning method. That being said, the Google Tango project looks really cool and will definitely be interesting to see how that develops over the years and is integrated into a Surveyors workflow.

A good post 🙂
I also believe there will always be a place for laser scanning in a similar form to what we currently know it. But I think this will only be a part of our outputs.

I suspect that something like Project Tango will morph into a crowd sourced data set. The accuracy may well be improved the more times an area is captured.
It would be cool to have some kind of indication as to the likely accuracy of the data that is available when the time comes.

> Have seen this song and dance before. With EDM it was "You will not be able to buy a steel tape in a few years." With data collectors "You will not be able to buy a field book in a few years." Total stations were going to totally replace angle only transits/theodolites, etc. etc. etc. and on and on. Each tool has a place in what we do and there are overlaps in capability.
>
> Our real job is to select the best tool to solve a specific problem. This usually means one size does not fit or provide equal value in all applications.

Absolutely our job is to select the best tool for the data capture task at hand.

I do however disagree with the sentiment that we have seen all of this before with EDM, GPS and GIS etc.
These were all advances but in isolation.

The current shift in the construction industry towards a BIM way of working is helping laser scanning in a big way.
Many more people in the construction industry are becoming aware of laser scanning and point clouds. This in turn is making them consider surveying/data capture more than they previously had.

How often previously has the deliverable from surveyors been their raw data? Not often I would wager.
We have always undertaken an exercise to convert our notes from our field books, EDM, total stations, GPS, photogrammetry and now laser scanners to digital drawings or models.

This fundamental process is changing. More and more clients are no longer asking for drawings or models. They are asking only for the point cloud.
OK, I'll admit that to produce a point cloud of any size and substance you still need to undertake a certain amount of survey computations, but even this can be skipped for small projects and just cloud to cloud registration can be used.

As a client here in the land survey team at London Underground, we are frequently giving out work packages for large jobs (months on site) where our only deliverable is the point cloud.

There is an increasing amount of people I speak to in the UK and global construction industry that are requesting only point clouds from they survey companies because they now have the ability to bring point clouds in to their design software.
This is across multiple disciplines and size of company from small 2 person comapnies up to large multinational corporations.

These are the people we should be listening to as an industry.
After all, they are ultimately the ones that will be paying our wages.

> We don't own a scanner and I'm certainly not schilling for Leica, but his assertion that the Faro Focus does the same thing as a Leica C10 is flat out wrong. I've seen the results firsthand of a head-to-head comparison of the two; the C10 data was much cleaner. It's like saying that my Ford Fusion is the same thing as a Mercedes Benz - the Fusion is a nice car that will get you where you're going, but it's not the same thing.

As I said in the original article; look at the big picture. A point cloud from a C10 is fundamentally the same as a point cloud from a Faro Focus.
Yes the C10 will be a bit cleaner and more accurate-both by only around 20mm. But I have worked with scan data for almost 15 years now and there have been very few times that I needed super clean data. I have of course used data from a multitude of different scanners and to me, there is very little difference in the clouds that mean I can not extract from one but not another.

I would propose that a large part of the perception of one vendor being better than another is down to the heritage that Leica has in survey which Faro does not.
Also, Leica made a very big deal about the dual axis compensator on the C10. Granted, being able to traverse with a scanner is a great feature, but does it improve accurace that much?
By the way, have you seen data from a Leica P20? :-O It may have sub mm noise as claimed at 120m, but how often do we undertake a survey from 120m away?
In a typical range of 10-30m the data has still not fully overcome the waveform processing oddities that plagued it upon launch.

> > We don't own a scanner and I'm certainly not schilling for Leica, but his assertion that the Faro Focus does the same thing as a Leica C10 is flat out wrong. I've seen the results firsthand of a head-to-head comparison of the two; the C10 data was much cleaner. It's like saying that my Ford Fusion is the same thing as a Mercedes Benz - the Fusion is a nice car that will get you where you're going, but it's not the same thing.
>
> Absolutely, I tried them both extensively and the C10 is a Survey instrument, the Faro is an Architectural/Crime Scene tool. Both have their place but for Surveying applications there is no comparison.

Is capturing a crime scene or undertaking a survey for an architect still not part of survey?
Scanners, from what ever vendor have enabled new markets for survey companies. I spent almost 10 years working at a survey company that did many scenes of crime surveys where a swift turn around on site is critical.
We also diversified via laser scanning into surveying for film sets. This was widely ridiculed at the time. It is now common place on all major motion pictures to have a set laser scanned.
I have seen Tim Webber of Oscar winning VFX company Framestore talk about their work on the film Gravity, even he spoke about lidar being critical to producing the look of the film the way they wanted it.

As was the theme for last years Autodesk Univeristy - Look Outside

Ralph

> Have you done any evaluation of the new Faro?
>
>> http://www2.faro.com/site/resources/share/2244
>
> We're just staring to compare data sets from it to the C10 and P20 we've previously used, but initially I like the looks of it for about 3/4 of the applications I use a scanner for.

I haven't looked into the 330, it seems pretty cool.My main concern with the Faro was the ability to geo-reference the scan to survey grade levels.

Ralph

> > > We don't own a scanner and I'm certainly not schilling for Leica, but his assertion that the Faro Focus does the same thing as a Leica C10 is flat out wrong. I've seen the results firsthand of a head-to-head comparison of the two; the C10 data was much cleaner. It's like saying that my Ford Fusion is the same thing as a Mercedes Benz - the Fusion is a nice car that will get you where you're going, but it's not the same thing.
> >
> > Absolutely, I tried them both extensively and the C10 is a Survey instrument, the Faro is an Architectural/Crime Scene tool. Both have their place but for Surveying applications there is no comparison.
>
> Is capturing a crime scene or undertaking a survey for an architect still not part of survey?

It depends on who you ask, No police department I know of hires surveyors to do that

> Scanners, from what ever vendor have enabled new markets for survey companies. I spent almost 10 years working at a survey company that did many scenes of crime surveys where a swift turn around on site is critical.
Again, most PD are trained to do their own scanning
> We also diversified via laser scanning into surveying for film sets. This was widely ridiculed at the time. It is now common place on all major motion pictures to have a set laser scanned.
> I have seen Tim Webber of Oscar winning VFX company Framestore talk about their work on the film Gravity, even he spoke about lidar being critical to producing the look of the film the way they wanted it.
>
> As was the theme for last years Autodesk Univeristy - Look Outside

Ralph

The 330 looks great on paper, I'm curious about using the onboard GPS to georeference the scans.

Lee D

We're just starting to play with the demo data; but the onboard GPS is cell phone grade, it's more as an aid in the registration process for the software to know where to look for common targets.

There is a pretty easy step in the registration process to insert survey control files then either manually and assign control point ID's to individual targets or let the software work with the target geometry and the control geometry to fit the sets together. But I really haven't looked into the precision that it's capable of.

We scanned the inside of our parking deck during the demo, so I'm going to have my guy cut some sections on the concrete walls to generate some of our own noise numbers.

What I like is that their not trying to develop much in the way of modeling software, just process and register the cloud then export it to whatever third party software is best for the particular application. We do a lot of transportation engineering so I just want to get the data into Bentley Pointools and their Bridge Information Modeling package as efficiently as possible.

Also Faro opens up the software source code to client to develop their own applications and are just staring to make third party plug in apps available on their website

Review

James,

If you wouldn't mind sharing some of your findings on the Faro. We are going through a demo with a guy from Surphaser today and will be testing it in our parking lot as well. Supposedly the accuracy is much better than the typical commercial scanning unit. (Leica, Faro or Z+F)

I would be really interested in the noise data you find from the Faro as well as any other strenghts/weaknesses of the unit.