1 INTRODUCTION Terrestrial laser scanning in spite of its costs has become a popular tool for the documentation of cultural heritage sites (Boehler & Marbs, 2002). No other measurement system can parallel the speed, range and accuracy of its dense point cloud acquisition. Naturally TLS was the first choice of methods, when the cooperation in the documentation of cultural heritage sites in Jor- dan was established in-between the Institute for Photogrammetry of the Universität Stuttgart, Germany and the Queen Rania's Institute for Tourism and Cultural Heritage of the Hashemite University. The first part of this paper is dedicated to the results which have been achieved so far in this cooperation. We present the sites, that have been selected for documentation and we give an overview of the results obtained from laser scanning. The second part of this paper is dedicated to our approaches of further automation in TLS a prerequisite for the widespread ap- plication of this technology. 2 DATA COLLECTION AND PREPROCESSING The collection of the data, which has been used for our investigations, was performed in coop- eration with the Hashemite University of Jordan. The project aims on the exemplarily genera- tion of 3D documentations for the two main heritage sites in Jordan, Petra and the ancient city of Jerash. In the following sections we will give a short introduction to the two sites and their historic significance. 2.1 Al-Khasneh Monument The ancient Nabataean city of Petra has often been called the eighth wonder of the ancient world. Petra city in southwestern Jordan prospered as the capital of the Nabataean empire from 400 B.C. to A.D. 106. Petra's temples, tombs, theaters and other buildings are scattered over 400 square miles, these architectures are carved into rose-colored sandstone cliffs. After a visi- Automation in Laser Scanning for Cultural Heritage Applications Jan Böhm, Norbert Haala, Yahya Alshawabkeh Institute for Photogrammetry Universität Stuttgart, Germany ABSTRACT: Within the paper we present the current activities of the Institute for Photogram- metry in cultural heritage documentation in Jordan. In particular two sites, Petra and Jerash, were recorded using terrestrial laser scanning (TLS). We present the results and the current status of the recording. Experiences drawn from these projects have led us to investigate more automated approaches to TLS data processing. We detail two approaches within this work. The automation of georeferencing for TLS data is presented along with our approach for automated feature extraction.