Dr. Anna Shcherbacheva joined Terrasolid in 2024 as an R&D and AI Developer, specializing in advanced AI tools for point cloud processing. She holds a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, Finland. Before transitioning to industry, Anna spent four years (2017–2021) at the Institute for Atmospheric and Earth System Research (INAR), University of Helsinki, conducting research and assisting in academic teaching. During this period, she also contributed to organizing scientific workshops and conferences in Finland. Anna continued her career at the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute (National Land Survey of Finland), where she focused on developing LiDAR-based applications for forestry and forest ecology. Her work was recognized with the Best Paper Award at ISPRS Geospatial Week 2023, for an innovative method in separating foliage from leaves in point cloud data.
Surveying techniques for large-area mapping such as airborne laser scanner have been used to measure changes via 3D point cloud comparison. We implemented into Terrasolid software module TerraScan an approach for the detection and visualization of 3D topographic change using openly available airborne laser scanning (ALS) data from Finland. This approach is applied to two point cloud epochs (from 2017 and 2021) to identify and analyse changes related to city area — revealing disappearing trees, new buildings, and even small extensions to existing structures. In TerraScan, this process is driven by a special distance-based attribute called "Change", which quantifies differences between new and reference point clouds.This change attribute is computed automatically, stored in the project definition, and visualized using intuitive color schemes—making it easy to spot changes at a glance.TerraScan also offers advanced color mapping to highlight subtle structural differences.For large-area monitoring, multiple TerraBatch instances can run in parallel, dramatically accelerating the change detection process at the project scale at the top speed.
