Dense 3D Displacement Estimation for Landslide Monitoring via Fusion of TLS Point Clouds and Embedded RGB Images
arXiv:2506.16265 · doi:10.1016/j.jag.2026.105093
Abstract
Landslide monitoring is essential for understanding geohazards and mitigating associated risks. Existing point cloud-based methods, however, typically rely on either geometric or radiometric information and often yield sparse or non-3D displacement estimates. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical partitioning-based coarse-to-fine approach that integrates 3D point clouds and co-registered RGB images to estimate dense 3D displacement vector fields. Patch-level matches are constructed using both 3D geometry and 2D image features, refined via geometric consistency checks, and followed by rigid transformation estimation per match. Experimental results on two real-world landslide datasets demonstrate that the proposed method produces 3D displacement estimates with high spatial coverage (79% and 97%) and accuracy. Deviations in displacement magnitude with respect to external measurements (total station or GNSS observations) are 0.15 m and 0.25 m on the two datasets, respectively, and only 0.07 m and 0.20 m compared to manually derived references, all below the mean scan resolutions (0.08 m and 0.30 m). Compared with the state-of-the-art method F2S3, the proposed approach improves spatial coverage while maintaining comparable accuracy. The proposed approach offers a practical and adaptable solution for TLS-based landslide monitoring and is extensible to other types of point clouds and monitoring tasks. The example data and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/gseg-ethz/fusion4landslide.
Published in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation. 25 pages, 19 figures