An Automated Approach for Contour Lines Generation Using Terrestrial Laser Scanner Data

Contouring is commonly used method for terrain mapping. Contour lines illustrate the profile (topography) of the land surface. In the process of contour lines generation, elevation data of terrain is mandatory. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) or laser scanning technology is acknowledged as a remote sensing technique, to generate massive amounts of densely spaced geo-referenced three dimensional points that sample the elevation of a terrain. In present study, an automated method for generating the contour lines using Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) data has been proposed. Proposed method consist four steps, first step divides the TLS data into regular two dimensional square grids. Generation of depth image is performed in second step of proposed method. In third step, pixels having same depth are identified at pre-defined contour interval. Contour lines are generated in forth step, by joining the same depth pixels with the help of convex-hull.