Dense 3D displacement estimation for landslide monitoring via fusion of TLS point clouds and embedded RGB images


Loading...

Date

2026-02

Publication Type

Journal Article

ETH Bibliography

yes

Citations

Altmetric

Data

Abstract

Landslide monitoring is essential for understanding geohazards and mitigating associated risks. Existing point cloud-based methods, however, typically rely on either geometric or radiometric information and often yield sparse or non-3D displacement estimates. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical partitioning-based coarse-to-fine approach that fuses 3D point clouds and co-registered RGB images to estimate dense 3D displacement vector fields. Patch-level matches are constructed using both 3D geometry and 2D image features, refined via geometric consistency checks, and followed by rigid transformation estimation per match. Experimental results on two real-world landslide datasets demonstrate that the proposed method produces 3D displacement estimates with high spatial coverage (79% and 97%) and accuracy. Deviations in displacement magnitude with respect to external measurements (total station or GNSS observations) are 0.15 m and 0.25 m on the two datasets, respectively, and only 0.07 m and 0.20 m compared to manually derived references, all below the mean scan resolutions (0.08 m and 0.30 m). Compared with the state-of-the-art method F2S3, the proposed approach improves spatial coverage while maintaining comparable accuracy. The proposed approach offers a practical and adaptable solution for TLS-based landslide monitoring and is extensible to other types of point clouds and monitoring tasks.

Publication status

published

Editor

Book title

Volume

146

Pages / Article No.

105093

Publisher

Elsevier

Event

Edition / version

Methods

Software

Geographic location

Date collected

Date created

Subject

Landslide monitoring; Terrestrial laser scanning; RGB image; Coarse-to-fine; Displacement vector field

Organisational unit

03964 - Wieser, Andreas / Wieser, Andreas check_circle

Notes

Funding

Related publications and datasets