In the recent past geodetic hardware has developed rapidly. In particular, total stations, being one of the major data acquisition tools for geometric information, were equipped with several kinds of additional sensors which enable new measurement approaches for geo-monitoring projects. The implementation of camera chips and the scanning capability in modern total stations allow us to replace signaled artificial control points by natural objects. For this purpose, surface structures and/or features have to be identified and recognized in different consecutive measurement epochs. Based on data acquired by a single total station of a landslide area in the Bavarian Alps, three different analyzing concepts are described and evaluated. These methods are still partly under development and first intermediate results are presented. The common objective of all approaches is to use single boulders as natural targets, which are distributed at the alpine pasture on the test site. The different analyses use images, point clouds, and a fused approach of both data types. The combination of image and scan is the first method that makes use of the full potential of modern total stations by utilizing different sensor data in a combined approach.     «

In the recent past geodetic hardware has developed rapidly. In particular, total stations, being one of the major data acquisition tools for geometric information, were equipped with several kinds of additional sensors which enable new measurement approaches for geo-monitoring projects. The implementation of camera chips and the scanning capability in modern total stations allow us to replace signaled artificial control points by natural objects. For this purpose, surface structures and/or featu...     »