What's a Point Cloud?

In honor of public works week we are featuring the first step in most infrastructure projects. Surveying. This image is a point cloud picture of an upcoming public works project in Avila Beach. It’s a bit technical but surveyors are a precise group of professionals.

The Avila Valley Road and Highway 101, shown in point cloud. A point cloud is a dataset (often very large) that represents objects and features in space and is made up of millions of points that each have spatial data (location, like X, Y, Z) and some amount of metadata, like color of point, intensity, etc. The other images are examples of the power of this technology.

Wallace Group deployed several Trimble point cloud scanning solutions during its mapping of the Avila Valley Road at Highway 101. A point cloud is a surveyor’s solution to bringing a real world representation back to the office. This project consists of millions of points and hundreds of photographs captured over several days of field work. By bringing this data into the office we are able to complete a large portion of the mapping that would have typically been gathered by field crews working in and around traffic. From the point cloud model we extract information such as the road surface, bridge heights, and much, much more all from the safety of our office. The extraction of these features is then compiled in Civil 3d in a drawing format, so it is easily used by transportation engineers and designers. This approach saves our clients time and money.