Testing the measurability of steel sections with terrestrial laser scanners

When assessing the health of steel structures, capturing, and modelling the geometry is especially important. Point cloud-based technologies have special requirements; previous studies revealed certain challenges that are to be resolved. In this paper, we aimed to develop a method to investigate the effects that the surface reflectance, incidence angle, and distance have on the quality of the point cloud of steel sections. A controlled environment was established for the research, where three terrestrial laser scanners were used to measure four different steel specimens. For validation, we also made reference measurements with a structured light scanner. Due to a large amount of data, a workflow with own routines has been developed for processing the prepared measurement datasets. For standard steel sections, the comparative study clearly showed a significant influence of the section shape, resulting in occlusion and unfavorable incidence angles. Of the devices tested, the one de-signed for high-precision measurements showed the intensity highlighting phenomenon for highly reflective surfaces, however, the measurements demonstrate that with careful selection of measurement conditions and a few pre-processing steps, the technology is well suited for the assessment of steel structures.