Programmatic Simulation of Laser Scanning Products

The technology of laser scanning is widely used for producing three-dimensional digital representations of geographic features. The measurement results are usually available in the form of 3D point clouds, which are often used as a transitional data model in various remote sensing applications. Unfortunately, while the costs of Light Detection And Ranging scanners have dropped significantly in recent years, they are still considered to be quite expensive for smaller institutions. In consequence, the process of 3D point cloud acquisition remains a difficult one, requiring investment not only in scanning equipment, but also time to operate it and process the obtained results. However, if the goal does not involve the 3D digitalization of a particular object, but instead the point clouds are required e.g. for testing reconstruction algorithms, in many cases such input data can be successfully substituted with the results of a simulated scanning process, which is far easier to accomplish. This paper presents a programmatic simulator which generates artificial scanning results from solid meshes provided by the user and saves them in the form of point cloud datasets.