Rapid high-fidelity visualisation of multispectral 3D mapping

Mobile LIDAR scanning typically provides captured 3D data in the form of 3D 'Point Clouds'. Combined with colour imagery these data produce coloured point clouds or, if further processed, polygon-based 3D models. The use of point clouds is simple and rapid, but visualisation can appear ghostly and diffuse. Textured 3D models provide high fidelity visualisation, but their creation is time consuming, difficult to automate and can modify key terrain details. This paper describes techniques for the visualisation of fused multispectral 3D data that approach the visual fidelity of polygon-based models with the rapid turnaround and detail of 3D point clouds. The general approaches to data capture and data fusion are identified as well as the central underlying mathematical transforms, data management and graphics processing techniques used to support rapid, interactive visualisation of very large multispectral 3D datasets. Performance data with respect to real-world 3D mapping as well as illustrations of visualisation outputs are included.