Detecting stones in point-clouds

The Seddülbahir Project involved documentation of a large-scale architectural heritage site in Turkey. Cyclone software and Cloudworx was used for post-processing of point-clouds. Another indicator for recognition of objects is change in the perception of depth relative to the plane of an object. A tool for the extraction of stones was developed by analyzing differences in depth for each point, which was 'Stone Wall Tool' (SWT). SWT analyses the distance of each point to a specified plane relative to the object, detecting and storing information about the cloud and the coordinate system set to a local coordinate system using these three points. A tolerance value has to be put into the equation in SWT to ensure that the user can select points in defined depths. This tolerance value is defined by the user according to the stonewall structure and scanning density of the point-cloud data.