Visualização e interpretação de modelos digitais de afloramentos utilizando laser scanner terrestre

Abstract

The LIDAR system provides georeferrenced clouds with thousand-to-million of points which can be converted in digital outcrops models. A laser beam is emitted and captured by a laser scanner after reaching an outcrop in many different positions. Based on the travel time between sensor and outcrop it is possible to determine the position of each point with high accuracy. This technique is still a novelty for applied studies in Geology, especially in Digital Outcrop Models (DOMs), being necessary research and development. Thus, the goal of this work was establish a workflow concerning acquisition and processing of point clouds, and visualization and geological interpretation of DOMs. The Pedra Pintada, located in the state Rio Grande do Sul in the city Caçapava do Sul outcrop was imaged from seven different stations and the cloud has 17 million points, converted in a DOM after processing. The geological interpretation was made possible by the orthorectification technique, in which a high resolution photograph overlies the point cloud and the visual quality is obtained. The huge volume of data, the lack of optimized processing resources and the inadequate dataset management became visualization and interpretation of DOMs a difficult task. Furthermore, it is necessary to develop a software with an efficient tridimensional visualization system with specific tools for geological interpretations.