The Ipad Pro Built-in Lidar Sensor: 3d Rapid Mapping Tests and Quality Assessment

Abstract

Abstract. The main goal of this ongoing research is the evaluation of the iPad Pro built-in LiDAR sensor for large scale 3D rapid mapping. Different aspects have been considered from the architectural surveying perspective and several analyses were carried out focusing on the acquisition phase and the definition of best practices for data collection, the quantitative analysis on the acquired data and their 3D positional accuracy assessment, and the qualitative analysis of the achievable metric products. Despite this paper is a preliminary analysis and deeper studies in various application environment are necessary, the availability of a LiDAR sensor embedded in a tablet or mobile phone, appears promising for rapid surveying purposes. According to test outcomes, the sensor is able to rapidly acquire reliable 3D point clouds suitable for 1:200 architectural rapid mapping; the iPad Pro could represent an interesting novelty also thanks to its price (compared to standard surveying instruments), portability and limited time required both for data acquisition and processing.

Smartphone LiDAR Data: A Case Study for Numerisation of Indoor Buildings in Railway Stations

“…Since then, the technology has also proven itself on Apple smartphones and tablets (iPad Pro, iPhone 12 Pro, 13 Pro, and 14 Pro). The integrated LiDAR consists of an array of a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) and a direct time-of-flight (dToF) near-infrared (NIR) CMOS image sensor (CIS) with a single photon avalanche diode array (SPAD) [ 28 ]. We focused on the iPhone 12 Pro ( Figure 1 ) because of its low cost, its simplicity of use, and its public accessibility (14.6 × 7.1 × 07 cm; height: 186 g; resolution 1284 × 2778 Mpx; panoramic 63 Mpx).…”

“…In this phase, we select a set of scanners with which to make comparisons on our LiDAR smartphone sensor. Based on the work of [ 19 , 28 , 29 ], we used two TLs scanners and a dynamic scanner. The scanning environment was selected according to the different use cases previously defined in Section 3.2 .…”

“…In recent works, the LiDAR sensors of the iPad Pro [ 28 ] were tested at six different resolutions on building facades in order to evaluate the metrics of the datasets. Comparing these datasets with a static scan in a field environment (open space), the results showed the data from these sensors (processed and high resolution).…”

“…Our experimental approach includes a controlled environment study and a field (in situ) study (where the sensors are tested in different environmental settings). For the in situ tests, we make a comparison of the data captured by the smartphone with those captured with a TLS scanner [ 28 , 29 , 30 ]. However, in our work, the digitised environments are chosen according to the constraints that the space of the station buildings may present.…”

Automating building element detection for deconstruction planning and material reuse: A case study

“…The scaling was checked using manual spot measurements of the distance between the flat faces of the columns to ensure that it could be properly compared to the ground truth. Although generally measuring true distances, the Apple Lidar system has an observed per-point mean error of 1-2 cm [37,76], and total error at the building scale of up to 10 cm [77]. As this final discrepancy is due to non-linear errors during the mobile trajectory reconstruction, there was no attempt to correct it using scaling.…”