ABSTRACT
Our hard infrastructure is key to the functioning of our current society. It comprises roads and railroads, tunnels and bridges, but also dams and notably public and private buildings. As soon as such structure is delivered, its state starts to deteriorate because of natural wear. Structural deficiencies or extreme external forces may accelerate this state deterioration. Structural monitoring aims at detecting possibly dangerous deformations in a structure, resulting in either intervention or normal maintenance. In recent years, laser scanning emerged as a suitable technique to efficiently measure structures at scales between millimeters to hundreds of kilometers. Laser scanning samples a surface at intervals regular to the sensor platform, resulting in huge point clouds. Still it is challenging to operationally extract useful geometric information from such point clouds. This chapter reviews recent methodological developments in the full processing chain from data acquisition to reporting the quality of the results. It will shortly discuss different laser scanning systems and corresponding acquisition issues, alignment issues, and different existing and emerging methodologies to extract changes in structures at different scales.
