Comparison of point clouds captured with terrestrial laser scanners with different technical characteristic

Terrestrial Laser Scanners come with different technical parameters like the wavelength (laser colour), range or even the distance measuring method. Within this work the surface of a large-scale concrete – Rożnów Dam -structure was captured by three different Terrestrial Laser Scanners with different technical parameters - Leica C10, Riegl VZ -400 and the Z+F Imager 5010. The captured three dimensional point clouds were further evaluated by analysing the parameters of a fitted plane in each case that has been derived with the help of a least squares adjustment. This paper describes different analysis of registered point clouds. Presented results indicate significant differences between representations of scanned surface, measured in the same weather conditions, using three different scanner models. Analysis revealed differences in “grain” and texture of obtained visualization, as well as registered data completeness. These differences might play a significant role during conducting analysis of an engineering object changes and deformations based on point clouds registered in different time periods.