FARO Orbis Premium Best Practices
Overview
FARO Orbis Premium is a powerful and highly productive capturing solution. Depending on the expected outcome, the processing time might be long. This article will provide helpful tricks and best practices to get the best out of your scanner.
How to Get the Most Out of Your Scan Session
The FARO Orbis Premium scanner was designed to create high-density point clouds at every scan session. After all, we know all too well that you have only one chance to get on site and after it is too late!
This density should not become a problem during processing. In this regard, we enable you to decide for yourself: You, our client, have the chance to adjust your point cloud density according to your project requirements.
Once you start your processing steps, it is always important to ask yourself the following questions:
- What is the expected outcome of the scan session?
- General 3D knowledge
- As-built 2D layout
- Detail drawing for designs
- What is the relevant point cloud density?
- 2mm
- 10mm
- 50mm
To simplify your life, we have created specific workflows that will help you.
How Does the Advanced Processing Workflow Work?
We know that time is money and that it is very difficult to achieve a top tier capture in minimum time. We also know from experience that a unique processing workflow will never match all use cases, and specific settings will be required sooner or later.
For this purpose, we created the Advanced Processing workflow.
Advanced Processing Workflow Overview
- SLAM processing = Compute a scanner trajectory based on Local SLAM and Global compensation.
- Filters = Specific filters are applied to the original point cloud to improve it and remove unwanted points.
- Noise reduction = Improved point cloud overall noise level without compromise regarding accuracy.
- Thinning = It will sample the mobile point cloud with a grid selected by the user. This reduces the total amount of points and keeps only the point cloud density required by the project
- Colorization = Add RGB information from the camera to your SLAM point cloud for a better understanding of the captured areas.
- Flash = Extract enhanced colored static scans (.laz) - FARO Orbis and FARO Orbis Premium only.
All the steps mentioned above are all optional. With the Advanced Processing workflow, FARO wants to offer you as much freedom as possible during processing. For more detailed explanations on the filters, please see FARO Connect Overview article here.
This is Advanced Processing workflow requires more expertise and technical understanding of the involved processing options. If you do not feel comfortable taking all these decisions on the processing steps, you can, of course, also use the Default workflow.
Why You Should Adjust Filters and Density
Time to data is a key driver for your success. One of the easiest ways to improve it is to align your density to the expected usage. Here is an example of the expected gain you could expect by simply adjusting your settings.
For this analysis, we always kept the same settings for step 1,2,3 and 5. We only adjusted the density step 4 settings.
Example of a 7min33sec loop with a FARO Orbis Premium with those processing parameters:
| SLAM Environment |
Filters
|
Thinning | Color type | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | See table for settings | High resolution | |||||
Example of time saved for high resolution color processing:
No point reduction
20mm reduction
Example of files size after saving:
Conclusion
You could save up to 60% on your processing step without compromising the point cloud quality.
You could save up to 72% of you project size if you align your point cloud density to your actual requirements.
This good practice will also improve your storage costs and daily activity by making every aspect of your daily tasks a little bit faster.