TerraScan
Introduction
TerraScan is a dedicated software solution for processing laser scanning point clouds. It can easily handle millions of points as all routines are tweaked for optimum performance.
Its versatile tools prove useful for a number of application fields, such as transmission lines, flood plains, proposed highways, stock piles, forest areas, city models, road and railroad surveying, and much more.
The application reads points from binary files or text files. It provides tools to:
•display point clouds in many different ways
•define your own point classes such as ground, vegetation, buildings or wires
•organize huge point clouds in projects
•manage trajectory information
•classify points using automatic filter routines
•classify points interactively
•digitize features by snapping to laser points
•detect and vectorize object features, such as buildings, powerline wires and towers, overhead wires, road breaklines, rails
•analyze object conditions, such as road surfaces, lines-of-sight, clearance areas, danger objects for roads, rails and wires, change detection
•create colored point clouds (requires also TerraPhoto)
•export colored raster images
•output classified points into text or binary files
•and much more
TerraScan is integrated with the CAD platform. This CAD environment provides a large number of useful tools and capabilities in the areas of view manipulation, visualization, vector placement and labeling. A basic understanding of the CAD platform usage is required in order to be productive with TerraScan.
TerraScan Lite
TerraScan Lite is a light version of TerraScan and provides a subset of the functionality of the full version. It can be used to view point clouds, setup projects, work on loaded points and classify points manually. It provides all the tools for manual 3D building model editing.
TerraScan Lite does only include a very limited number of automatic classification routines; it does not contain automatic building and powerline vectorization tools, and waveform processing tools.
The Function matrix provides a complete overview of tools and commands available in the different TerraScan versions.
TerraScan UAV
TerraScan UAV is another lighter version of TerraScan dedicated for processing point clouds that are collected by UAV-mounted scanners. It provides the full functionality of TerraScan but only for a limited size of the point cloud. Basically, the points must fit in memory for processing tasks as there are no tools for splitting the point cloud into smaller parts. On the other hand, the version provides pre-defined routines for the most common processing tasks. This allows full-automatic point cloud processing.
TerraScan UAV does not include the same project capabilities as the full version, it does not contain waveform processing and tunnel analysis tools.
The Function matrix provides a complete overview of tools and commands available in the different TerraScan versions.
