Surfacing the Statue of Liberty

In this example ARANZ's FastRBF^TM software was used to fit a surface to a LIDAR scan of the Statue of Liberty*. Data were acquired from a limited number of scan positions taken at oblique viewing angles. No data was recorded from the back of, or above, the statue. Consequently there are very large holes in the data. An error-bar fit was used to fit the smoothest surface within 0.01m of the data - sufficient accuracy for this application.

Anti aliasing

A low pass filter was automatically employed during mesh generation in the figure below and for the detail view of the face shown opposite to avoid aliasing artefacts since the facet size (mesh sampling interval) was greater than the finest level of detail present in the raw data.

This example illustrates:

• the remarkable surface extrapolation ability of RBFs
• the ability to fit to data with varying data density
• the restricted viewing angles encountered when scanning large objects
• the problems of occlusion encountered with real scans of large objects

	Fitting statistics 3,360,300 data points 402,118 RBF centres Height 76m Fit tolerance 0.1m Links LIDAR surface reconstruction page - more examples of LIDAR imaging Smoothing and approximating LIDAR data Smoothing and approximation FAQ Surface fitting FAQ Surfacing applications
*Lidar data courtesy of Cyra Technologies