Article Excerpt:
"Laser scanning produces highly accurate digital terrain models and as-built drawings of a busy Dallas highway without closing lanes or endangering surveyors.
Often described as 'the main street of the Metroplex,' the 22-mile-long Dallas North Tollway (DNT) is the primary corridor between the downtown Dallas business districts and growing cities north of Dallas. This stretch of six-lane highway supports as many as 140,000 vehicles and more than 450,000 toll transactions each day. So when the North Texas Tollway Authority (NTTA) was ready to embark on a tollway widening project, they looked to do so while maintaining safety for motorists, as well as for engineers, planners, and land surveyors who would need to collect the necessary data.
Time estimates for the project indicated that gathering the data using conventional survey techniques would take at least a month, given the required accuracy."
To read more of "A picture is worth 45 million data points," visit the July 2005 issue of CE News on-line:
