Monitoring Infrastructural Changes in Challenging Terrains Using a Drone-Based 3D Point Cloud Approach for the North Eastern Region

The North Eastern Region of India presents a challenging environment for infrastructure monitoring due to its complex hilly terrain, limited physical connectivity, and localized conflict zones. Traditional monitoring methods, which rely heavily on physical site visits, are both time-consuming and costly, often failing to provide accurate and timely information on project progress. This paper explores the use of geospatial technology, specifically drone-derived 3D point clouds, as an innovative solution for monitoring infrastructural changes in this region. By employing drone imaging, feature detection, and 3D modeling, the study demonstrates an effective approach for tracking and analyzing changes in infrastructure over time. The results highlight the advantages of using 3D point clouds for detailed change detection and visual analytics, offering a more efficient and precise method for infrastructure monitoring. The paper shows proposed computer vision-based drone data process pipeline for generating dense 3D point clouds at different time periods. The result shows perfect point cloud registration with optimal transformation matrix having minimal translational error and highlights areas of significant changes.A GUI is developed to load 3D Point clouds, visualize, interactively analyze, compare and quantify the changes.