A group of Italian researchers have reported that they have developed an empirical approach that evaluates the largest spot spacing in order to achieve the appropriate resolution to recognize the required surface details in a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) survey. They used an Optech scanner but claim that the results are independent of the manufacturer.
Results show that the discrimination of elements smaller than a third of the beam divergence is not possible and that the ratio between the used spot-spacing and the element size is linearly related to the acquisition range. The obtained results allow the optimization of a terrestrial laser scanning survey in terms of acquisition time and surface details recognition.
These results sound very promising and definitely worth a review.
