Solid image, a new tool for sampling rock fractures by a remote sensing way

Solid image is a new concept for the exploitation of lidar data. It allow to measure easily plane's orientation on outcrops, and to measure characteristics of structurally significant features (position, orientation, surface). We present in this paper advantage and inconvenient of this tool compared with numerical photogrammetry. Integration of lidar data in numerical modeling prior to numerical simulation is also discussed. Definition of the solid image A solid image is a numerical image with radiometric layer(s) as usual (red green blue, or gray scale for panchromatic photo) and additional layers which give the location of each pixel. Theses layers may be three layers, with the X, Y and Z coordinate of each pixel; or the positional informations may be present in a single distance layer (distance between the pixel and the center of perspective of the camera). In that case calibration and orientation of the camera are needed to transform the distance information in positional information. (Dequal 2003, Bornaz 2005).