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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Annals</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9050</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-411-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Joint Stone Segmentation and Feature Driven Deformation Analysis at Water Dams</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Tobies</surname>
<given-names>Annika</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Foth</surname>
<given-names>Judith</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Cornelißen</surname>
<given-names>André</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3948-0166</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Koller</surname>
<given-names>Eike</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Klingbeil</surname>
<given-names>Lasse</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Kuhlmann</surname>
<given-names>Heiner</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation, University of Bonn, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>03</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XI-1-2026</volume>
<fpage>411</fpage>
<lpage>418</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Annika Tobies et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/411/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-411-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/411/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-411-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/411/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-411-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-annals.copernicus.org/articles/XI-1-2026/411/2026/isprs-annals-XI-1-2026-411-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Structural health monitoring of water dams is crucial to ensure their long-term safety and operational reliability. Traditional geodetic techniques, although precise, are limited to sparse observation points and cannot capture spatially heterogeneous deformations. Laser scanning enables comprehensive, area-wide acquisition, overcoming this limitation. Subsequent deformation analysis often relies on comparisons along the local surface normal, which are limited in detecting in-plane movements. To address this, this study presents an approach that combines image-based stone segmentation with point-cloud-based deformation analysis to estimate both in-plane and out-of-plane displacements across masonry dam surfaces. Individual stones are detected in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery using a deep learning segmentation model (Mask R-CNN) and subsequently projected into corresponding point clouds acquired by terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) and UAV laser scanning. By establishing consistent stone correspondences across multi-epoch point clouds via centroid-based matching and local iterative closest point (ICP) alignment, the proposed method enables deformation analysis on a stone-by-stone level. Simulated deformations were applied to TLS- and UAV-based point clouds of a dam to evaluate the method. Results demonstrate that the approach achieves sub-centimeter accuracy for the TLS and low-centimeter accuracy for the UAV point cloud, as measured by the RMSE between the estimated and true deformation. Our approach outperforms conventional model-to-model comparison methods, such as Multiscale Model to Model Cloud Comparison (M3C2), for in-plane displacements. The integration of image segmentation and geometric analysis provides a powerful framework for full-field deformation monitoring of masonry structures, supporting the detection of instabilities and improving dam safety.</p>
</abstract>
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