Introducing SLAM-Based Portable Laser Scanning for the Metric Testing of Topographic Databases

The advent of portable laser scanners leveraging Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) technology has recently enabled the rapid and efficient acquisition of detailed point clouds of the surrounding environment while maintaining a high degree of accuracy and precision, on the order of a few centimeters. This paper explores the use of SLAM systems in an uncharted application domain, namely the metric testing of a large-scale, three-dimensional topographic database (TDB). Three distinct operational procedures (point-to-cloud, line-to-cloud, and line-to-line) are developed to facilitate a comparison between the vector features of the TDB and the SLAM-based point cloud, which serves as a reference. A comprehensive evaluation carried out on the TDB of the Friuli Venezia Giulia region (Italy) highlights the advantages and limitations of the proposed approaches, demonstrating the potential of SLAM-based surveys to complement, or even supersede, the classical topographic field techniques usually employed for geometric verification operations.