Lidar vs Photogrammetry Comparison

Scan quality has always been a big concern for the 3D reconstruction industry, so it’s time to do a quick comparison between two main technologies (Lidar & Photogrammetry).

Left: Lidar
Right: Photogrammetry

Lidar scanning uses specific hardware sensors to capture depth information from the outside world. The benefits of this technology is it doesn’t take a lot of processing time and can be used to create 3D models on mobile devices in real time. At the moment Spectre3D on iOS uses this technology to build our final models. It’s quick, and allows us to create reasonably accurate results in the proper scale. One drawback is the data comes in fairly messy and needs to be cleaned and filtered in order to be able to work with it, and even then accuracy will be degraded.

Photogrammetry is a completely visual solution, meaning it only needs a sequence of images or video to be compiled into a 3D model, no extra hardware necessary. The results are stunning as they can provide millimeter level of detail. One of the main drawbacks is the processing time; you will need a desktop computer to perform the intensive math operations and a considerable amount of time to put the model together.

Lidar Scan

Photogrammetry Scan

What we’ve done at Spectre3D is we saved the raw that was used on the iOS device to create our initial Lidar scan and then fed it into our desktop photogrammetry solution. As you can see the detail from the rock carving really comes through in the photogrammetry solution.

Soon Spectre3D will allow you to create your regular lidar scan and see the results on-the-go, and if you want, augment that scan to the higher quality using our photogrammetry solution.

Happy Scanning!