Feasibility Exploration of the Numerical Simulation of Photogrammetry in Rock Slopes Based on Field Tests

Digital photogrammetry technology has been extensively utilized in identifying rock mass discontinuities, with its measurement accuracy and multi-source errors have been thoroughly scrutinized. However, several challenges persist in field experiments, including the issue of inaccurately measured true data and errors in geo-referencing, which hinder the reliability of results. The purpose of this paper was to overcome the limitations of traditional field experiments through the digitized process in numerical simulation of photogrammetry, which has the advantages of high efficiency and high accuracy. Based on a case study of a rock slop, both field and simulation experiments were designed to quantitatively investigate the effect of coordinate accuracy of ground control points (GCPs) on the photogrammetric accuracy of discontinuity geometric parameters. The highly consistent results between numerical simulations and field experiments further confirmed the feasibility of the numerical simulation procedure. It is promising that the numerical simulation procedure has the potential to replace the field experiments by guiding and optimizing the arrangement scheme of camera stations and GCPs before fieldwork, thereby balancing efficiency and accuracy.