Experiences of mobile mapping in environmental monitoring

This paper discusses the experiences gained in the research of monitoring the fluvial morphology and snow cover carried out by Mobile Mapping and EnviLaser teams of the Department of Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry, Finnish Geodetic Institute, in years 2008-2010. Finnish Geodetic Institute initiated the development of a mobile mapping system in 2003 with an aim to build a system that would maximize the automation of urban feature extraction at the post processing phase. Additionally, the system, called ROAMER, was aimed to be a prototype of a mapping instrument that could be flexibly adopted for various urban and environmental applications. To accomplish the high automation, a laser scanner capable of providing dense point clouds was set as the requirement for the system. Integrating laser scanner with mobile platforms (such as cars, tractors, or boats) has recently created a new field of applications thanks to its efficiency in covering relatively large areas with high resolution. In the study cases presented in this paper the mobile mapping system was mounted on a boat, a cart and snow mobile platforms. Vehicle-based systems are capable of faster and more effective data acquisition than current methods, such as photogrammetry, total station surveys and terrestrial laser scanning, used for field data collection. They also provide higher resolution and easier mobilization compared to the airborne laser scanning systems. Use of Mobile mapping has already become common in 3D modeling of, for example, urban areas and road environment.