Rockfall Change Detection along Colorado Highway 74 - Updating a Post-Scaling Database

ABSTRACT: Rockfalls along transportation routes represent a significant geological hazard, impacting both infrastructure and user safety. The CO-74 highway in Colorado is a well-traveled route into the Rocky Mountains, where roadcuts along the corridor are prone to rockfall events. To monitor this rockfall activity, high temporal resolution lidar data was collected over several years at a specific cut slope along CO-74, known as Site E. This study presents the results of change detection analysis at this site to update an existing rockfall database. Data processing was completed in CloudCompare software, including vegetation removal, registration, and change calculation. This analysis ultimately enabled the identification of distinct change clusters within the point cloud, along with their calculated volumes. Manual evaluation was performed to separate rockfall clusters from erroneous change clusters. Through evaluation of these results, the risk of rockfall can be better assessed and mitigated to improve safety along critical transportation routes like CO-74.