“…Traditional surveys are conducted via a window method or a line-scanning method (Gigli and Casagli, 2010;Kong et al, 2020), and require physical contact with the rock surface (Gigli and Casagli, 2010;Umili et al, 2013); however, this is time-consuming Kong et al, 2020) and subject to the expertise of the operator (Kong et al, 2020). With the advancement of measurement techniques, new non-contact surveying methods have been developed to acquire three-dimensional (3D) rock mass data, and include the total station method (Feng et al, 2001), close-range photogrammetry (De et al, 2012;Kaufmann, 2012;Francioni et al, 2019), and 3D laser scanning (Deliormanli et al, 2014;Monsalve et al, 2019;Wichmann et al, 2019;Jiang et al, 2020). These techniques have been rapidly utilized in slope monitoring (Kromer et al, 2019;Giacomini et al, 2020), rock mechanics and stability analysis (Firpo et al, 2011;Assali et al, 2014), and geomorphology (Brodie et al, 2015;Boothroyd et al, 2016), as well as the geological and geotechnical research fields (Giordan et al, 2018).…”