Photogrammetry is a non‐contact, high‐accuracy, practical and cost‐effective technique for a large number of medical applications. Lately, three‐dimensional (3D) laser scanning and digital imaging technology have raised the importance of digital photogrammetry technology to a new height in craniofacial mapping. Under the support of the Eighth Malaysian Development Plan, the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment (MOSTE) Malaysia allocated a grant to establish procedures for the development of a national craniofacial spatial database to assist the medical profession to provide better health services to the public. To populate the database with normal and abnormal (malformation, diseased and trauma and burn victims) craniofacial information, it is necessary to evaluate the technology needed to capture the essential data of craniofacial features. The paper provides a discussion on the basic features of the spatial data and the data capture techniques. Both are needed for the establishment of a national spatial craniofacial database. The discussion includes a brief review of the current status of two selected high‐accuracy craniofacial spatial data capture techniques, namely, digital photogrammetry and 3D laser scanning. The paper highlights a system which has been developed for a Malaysian craniofacial mapping project. Laboratory tests with mannequins showed that the photogrammetric and 3D laser scanning system could achieve an accuracy exceeding the design specification of ±0·7 mm (one standard deviation) for all the measured craniofacial distances. However, tests with two living subjects showed that the accuracy was in the order of ±1·2 mm because of facial movement during data capture.

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Population surveys and species recognition for roosting bats are either based on capture, sight or optical-mechanical count methods. However, these methods are intrusive, are tedious and, at best, provide only statistical estimations. Here, we demonstrated the successful use of a terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) laser scanner for remotely identifying and determining the exact population of roosting bats in caves. LIDAR accurately captured the 3D features of the roosting bats and their spatial distribution patterns in minimal light. The high-resolution model of the cave enabled an exact count of the visibly differentiated Hipposideros larvatus and their roosting pattern within the 3D topology of the cave. We anticipate that the development of LIDAR will open up new research possibilities by allowing researchers to study roosting behaviour within the topographical context of a cave's internal surface, thus facilitating rigorous quantitative characterisations of cave roosting behaviour.

The newly development of technology clearly shows an improvement of three-dimension (3D) data acquisition techniques. The requirements of 3D information and features have been obviously increased during past few years in many related fields. Generally, 3D visualization can provide more understanding and better analysis for making decision. The need of 3D GIS also pushed by the highly demand of 3D in geospatial related applications as well as the existing fast and accurate 3D data collection techniques. This paper focuses on the 3D data acquisition by using terrestrial laser scanning. In this study, Leica C10 terrestrial laser scanner was used to collect 3D data of the assets inside a computer laboratory. The laser scanner device is able to capture 3D point cloud data with high speed and high accuracy. A series of point clouds was produced from the laser scanner. However, more attention must be paid during the point clouds data processing, 3D modelling, and analysis of the laser scanned data. Hence, this paper will discuss about the data processing from 3D point clouds to 3D models. The processing of point cloud data divided into pre-processing (data registration and noise filter) and post-processing (3D modelling). During the process, Leica Cyclone 7.3 was used to process the point clouds and SketchUp was used to construct the 3D asset models. Afterward, the 3D asset models were exported to multipatch geometry format, which is a 3D GIS-ready format for displaying and storing 3D model in GIS environment. The final result of this study is a set of 3D asset models display in GIS-ready format since GIS can provides the best visual interpretation, planning and decision making process. This paper shows the 3D GIS data could be produced by laser scanning technology after further processing of point cloud data.

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