Image Assisted Total Stations: Prospects for Deformation Monitoring

Image assisted total stations (IATS) unify geodetic precision of total stations with areal coverage of images. The concept of using two IATS devices for high-resolution long-range stereo survey of georisk areas is currently being investigated in the EU-FP7 Project De-Montes (www.de-montes-eu). The paper gives an overview of an experiment that involved terrestrial laser scanning, digital photogrammetry and stereo IATS applied to the same site. The three complementary sensor concepts were used to capture a distant rock face, including a small simulated deformation area with controlled deformation. It is shown that in the specific experimental case the stereo IATS concept is able to obtain higher precision in determination of 3D deformation than terrestrial laser scanning and digital photogrammetry of comparable sensor establishment effort. Extrapolating from the experiment described, a trade-off between sensor performance, costs, availability / maturity of the different sensor concepts and applicability to various use cases is given.