Trimble Business Center

For a recent project we scanned a 2 mile stretch of road with our X9. I instructed the field crew to break it up by day by scanning up one side of a section of road and then back down the other side amounting to about 20 scans/day. Each scan day would have observations to at least 2 survey control points. My workflow below has me processing each scan day individually and I did it this way to keep the scan sizes small for processing.

Would it be more beneficial to register and georeference more scans together and then export sections? More beneficial in terms of the integrity of the cloud to cloud registration and georeference. 

Workflow:

1. Register and georef each scan day individually 
2. Export registered and georef TDX
3. Extract survey data from each individual processed TDX
4. Combine extracted data to one CAD DGN at the end

Paul,

Your workflow seams reasonable. Whether using Trimble Perspective or Fieldlink with the tablet and X9, you are doing a station by station in-field registration. It's up to you whether you observe precision points to targets (DR shot). If you have a proper target (i.e., 6" checkerboard target), remember that you can automatically extract those in the latest two versions of TBC (2025.20 or 2025.20.1). Extracting the target from the scan data is more efficient (in my opinion) as opposed to taking the DR shot (precision point) to said target in the field. The extraction of the target coordinates in my testing has been more accurate than I can sight the target with DR in the field. Each day after the last station, you can refine and export to TDX. Then bring said TDX into TBC. Continue to add those exported TDX files each day. If you have an issue georeferencing to extracted targets, remember that you can do a cloud to cloud (pairwise) registration from day one (all scans) to day two (all scans). Alternatively, you could create groups of stations in the field and then continue using the same Perspective (or FieldLink) job for all days on that same job. That is really up to you. See here for more on the target-based extraction/registration tool in TBC versions 2025.20.1 or 2025.20: https://youtu.be/na1hqYxRiwY?si=qtPqndX6Xx60DacH. 

Thanks for the tips. I did find that if I I export a TDX after registration the scans lose their registration association when I import them again. I also learned more about the View Filter Manager where I can turn off scans to speed up processing. I saw on a previous post where you mentioned changing the physical RAM to avoid crashing. Mine was sitting at 8 GB and I have 128 GB and changed it to 64 GB and it seems to have helped. 

In total I have 228 scans across 16 days. Should I register them all together in one big registration, or should I just keep each individual scan day registered and georeferenced on their own?