Mike Pinkerton

Mike Pinkerton's 2010 FIG paper, Terrestrial Laser Scanning for Mainstream Land Surveying, treated laser scanning as a technique moving beyond specialist novelty into ordinary survey practice. The instrument could rapidly collect dense three-dimensional observations of structures and terrain, but the surveying task still required control, registration, checking and a deliverable suited to the client. The scanner increased the quantity of measurement; it did not remove the need to decide what the measurements meant.