Analysis of Geological Section for Fault Trenches Using Laser Scanning Technique

Excavating fault trenches is one of main method to study paleoseismology. However, the current approach which costs considerable time and manpower only relies on geologists to recognize the multiple faulting events. Therefore, this study constructs an automatic procedure to map geological sections by using terrestrial LiDAR systems integrated with cameras. The experiment results indicated that the proposed approach can provide high-quality images of fault trenches and amount of image deformation can also be simultaneously evaluated. In the supervised classification procedures, the classification accuracies are also encouraging (overall accuracy 81.18% and kappa 0.7646). Furthermore, by using an existing geological section produced in 2002 with the texture analysis and classification from the image, the major categories can be correctly identified. It gives solid evidence that the terrestrial LiDAR techniques can be efficiently extended to the applications in geological studies.