Rapid 3D lidar change detection for geohazard identification using GPU-based alignment and M3C2 algorithms

Topographic change detection is increasingly being used to identify and monitor landslides and other geohazards in support of risk-informed decision making. Expanding change detection from site-specific to regional scales enables increasingly proactive asset management and contributes to improving the resilience of infrastructure to extreme events. It is widely known that change detection precision can be improved by applying three-dimensional (3D) algorithms, such as iterative closest point (ICP) and M3C2, directly to raw point clouds. However, this also increases the computational requirements compared to alternatives such as digital elevation model (DEM) differencing (DoD). This study presents a novel graphics processing unit (GPU) based implementation of the ICP-M3C2 workflow to address this limitation. In the proposed algorithm, point cloud data segments are automatically queued and served to the working GPU, which efficiently performs point cloud processing operations, while the central processing unit (CPU) performs data management operations in parallel. The developed method is estimated to be up to 54 times faster than CPU-based versions of the same algorithm. In this paper, we present how the workflow has been applied to six regional-scale landslide identification and monitoring case studies, in which landslides are causing the disruption of pipelines, highways, and rail corridors. Overall, in 2021 and 2022, over 17,500 linear kms of change detection were processed using the demonstrated method.