Accurate Digital Reconstruction of High-Steep Rock Slope via Transformer-Based Multi-Sensor Data Fusion

Accurate and comprehensive characterization of high-steep slopes is crucial for real-time risk prediction, disaster assessment, and damage evolution monitoring. The study focused on a high-steep rocky slope along the Yanjiang Expressway in Sichuan Province, China. A novel digital reconstruction method was introduced, which integrates terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry through a Transformer-based method combining GeoTransformer with the Maximal Cliques (MAC) algorithm. The results indicated that TLS excels in capturing fine-scale features, whereas UAV demonstrates superior performance in large-scale terrain reconstruction. However, multi-sensor data exhibit heterogeneity in terms of partial overlap, large outliers, and density differences. To address these challenges, the GeoTransformer-MAC framework extracts geometrically invariant features from cross-source point cloud (CSPC) to establish initial correspondences, followed by rigorous screening of high-quality locally consistent correspondences to optimize transformation parameters. This method achieves accurate digital reconstruction of the high-steep rock slope. Global and local error analyses verify the model’s superiority in both overall slope characterization and fine-scale feature representation. Compared with the TLS-only model and the conventional method, the Transformer-based method improves the slope model integrity by 85.58%, increases the data density by 9.71%, and improves the accuracy by nearly threefold. This study provides a novel approach for the digital modeling of complex terrains, which serves the refined identification and modeling of geohazards for high-steep slopes in complex mountainous regions.