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Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

Ok, this is tangential but there’s a lot of people in this thread who seem to have a good knowledge of lidar:

How close can you get to creating a decent topographical survey of your property with what’s available to consumers? Could you walk around with an iPad Pro and build a decent 3D model? Is there a not exorbitant drone solution?

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In the geosciences there has been a bit of research in the past 10 years using Structure from Motion techniques on images collected from normal cameras suspended from balloons, if a drone isn't available.

Both of these papers discuss making 3D models of topography on the scale of a house and yard. You can also probably get colors mapped onto the surfaces.

(Note that I believe both use AgiSoft structure from motion software, which is probably expensive. I have no idea what the FOSS options are.)

[1]: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geosphere/article/10/5/...

[2]: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Steven_Micklethwaite/pu...

I work at a company that does lidar SLAM. You can actually produce really high quality maps/slam with lidar/tof sensors, and it’s a lot more robust/dense than visual/imu mapping.

How does the price compare to traditional survey methods?

Depends on what you’re comparing to what. Big spinning lidars on cars are still expensive (few thousand dollars) but are coming down on price. Handheld 3D scanners on the other hand might start to become obseleted by a combination of cheap phone camera + lidar (really tof) sensors that are evidently cheap enough to put on phones. They can actually produce really high quality (SLAM) maps - Apple has figured out that they can have a much faster initial mapping phase by not having to do monocular mapping for their AR. So I guess I’m saying it’s cheaper and a bit worse, but it’s rapidly getting better.

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