Estimating Joint Roughness using Wavelet-Based Denoised Terrestrial Laser Scanning Data

Abstract

Numerous measurement and characterization methods have been developed over the past decades to quantify the roughness of rock joints. The characterization methods traditionally consider a 2D linear trace and are often limited to the laboratory scale. In this research, 3D point clouds of joint surfaces obtained with Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) have been analyzed to obtain 3D representations of joint roughness. While TLS enables remote acquisition of large scale in-situ joint surfaces, the resulting data include inherent range noise which generally results in significant overestimation of joint roughness. To denoise the TLS data, two wavelet transforms are applied in combination with diff..