The utilisation of airborne laser scanning for mapping George Vosselman * , Patrice Kessels, Ben Gorte Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, Kluyverweg 1, NL-2629 HS Delft, The Netherlands Accepted 15 October 2004 Abstract Laser scanning has become the standard technique for the acquisition of digital elevation models. With the increasing point densities point clouds acquired by laser scanning have the potential to also become valuable data for the production of three- dimensional topographical databases. This paper discusses the possibilities to use airborne laser scanning for two tasks: change detection and semi-automated 3D mapping of urban environments. While laser scanning is demonstrated to be useful for detecting changes as well as mapping errors, the implementation of mapping rules to avoid false alarm errors needs to be improved. The creation of 3D city models with laser altimetry data in a semi-automated way is considered efficient. A higher level of automation seems to be feasible to further improve the efficiency of three-dimensional mapping. # 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Laser altimetry; Change detection; Mapping; 3D GIS 1. Introduction The future’s information society will require up-to- date object-oriented three-dimensional geo-informa- tion. Already today, two-dimensional vector maps with update frequencies of a few years are insufficient for an increasing number of applications. To satisfy the new demands more automated methods for the production of geo-information are required to keep the costs within reasonable bounds. With the high pulse frequencies of the latest laser scanners laser altimetry can become a very valuable data source for the production of geo-information. This paper discusses the possibilities to use laser altimetry data for the purposes of change detection and adding the third dimension to two-dimensional topographical databases. Automation of change detection is a key issue in increasing revision frequencies without a large increase in costs. If maps are updated, say, once in every four years, a small percentage of topographic objects will be changed. When doubling the revision frequency the total number of the changes over two revisions will only be slightly higher than the number of changes in a 4-year revision cycle (due to a few www.elsevier.com/locate/jag International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation 6 (2005) 177–186 * Corresponding author. Present address: ITC, Enschede, The Netherlands. Tel.: +31 53 487 4344; fax: +31 53 487 4335. E-mail address: vosselman@itc.nl (G. Vosselman). 0303-2434/$ – see front matter # 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jag.2004.10.005