Assessment of landslide-induced displacement and deformation of above-ground objects using uav-borne and airborne laser scanning data

Abstract. Multi-temporal 3D point clouds acquired with a laser scanner can be efficiently used for an area-wide assessment of landslide-induced surface changes. In the present study, displacements of the Vogelsberg landslide (Tyrol, Austria) are assessed based on available data acquired with airborne laser scanning (ALS) in 2013 and data acquired with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a laser scanner (ULS) in 2018. Following the data pre-processing steps including registration and ground filtering, buildings are segmented and extracted from the datasets. The roofs, represented as multi-temporal 3D point clouds are then used to derive displacement vectors with a novel matching tool based on the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm. The resulting mean annual displacements are compared to the results of a geodetic monitoring based on an automatic tracking total station (ATTS) measuring 53 retroreflective prisms across the study area every hour since May 2016. In general, the results are in agreement concerning the mean annual magnitude (ATTS: 6.4 cm within 2.2 years, 2.9 cm a−1; laser scanning data: 13.2 cm within 5.4 years, 2.4 cm a−1) and direction of the derived displacements. The analysis of the laser scanning data proved suitable for deriving long-term landslide displacements and can provide additional information about the deformation of single roofs.