Digital twins already play an important role in the economy, but also in research. The geospatial data is thereby increasingly based on point clouds captured by laser scanners, as they allow a very dense sampling of the environment within a very short time. From these point clouds a number of geospatial products can be derived, e.g. terrain models, building or infrastructure models, or semantic maps through point cloud classification. Thus, the data derived from laser scanner measurements often form an essential part of the geospatial data of a digital twin.
The central goal of OPTRALS is the implementation of a prototype tool for the homogenization of georeferenced data, primarily laser scanning data. This tool shall simplify the integration of the processed data into a digital twin.
The homogenization of the data is planned with regard to the following aspects: georeferencing (relative and absolute orientation of point clouds), description by metadata, file formats, and coordinate systems. Due to the typically very large amounts of data, emphasis is laid on the scalability of the solution. Additionally, a high degree of automation, i.e. a minimum of manual interaction, should be aimed for.
The special rail environment requires a number of innovations for the development of algorithms to merge terrestrial, airborne and railborne laser scanning data. Among others it is planned to develop (a) a new matching strategy which uses infrastructure elements in a rail environment, (b) an algorithm which automatically selects the appropriate georeferencing strategy based on a quality control of the data performed in advance, and (c) algorithms which consider the environmental changes when merging data from different measurement epochs. It is planned to use existing solutions available on the market for some processing substeps. These solutions should be identified in the course of a market research conducted in an early stage of the project.
The prototype tool to be developed will be implemented and evaluated on the basis of sample data from the ÖBB.
