Title: A vehicle-borne and line-structure laser based two-dimensional surface roughness measurement instrument

Authors: Xiaojie Li; Kai Zhao

Addresses: Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 4888 Shengbei Street, Changchun 130102, China ' Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 4888 Shengbei Street, Changchun 130102, China

Abstract: Surface roughness is the description of surface irregularity and micro topographic randomness. It is an important factor affecting soil microwave radiation. Since both the microwave radiometer and radar detector measure a plane, using 3D data to calculate the 2D surface roughness will get better results. In this paper, we present a line-structure laser based vehicle-borne 2D surface roughness measurement instrument which can measure a much bigger size and thus bring higher accuracy and greater capability. Meanwhile, the portability is not affected since it is carried around by a vehicle. The precision test and field test showed that the maximum average relative error is only 1.3%. We also implemented a graphics processing unit version of the data processing program, which reduced the runtime to 540 seconds from 45,393 seconds on central processing unit.

Keywords: surface roughness; vehicle-borne tester; calibration; 3D scanning; GPU; graphics processing unit; laser scanning; laser triangulation; 2D roughness measurement.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVAS.2016.078808

International Journal of Vehicle Autonomous Systems, 2016 Vol.13 No.2, pp.140 - 151

Received: 25 Jun 2015
Accepted: 02 May 2016

Published online: 02 Sep 2016 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article