This is a complete accuracy assessment of the iPhone 16 Pro's camera and LiDAR sensors in comparison to a high-accuracy surveying Total Station. Okay, and I am now collecting data using the Pix4Dcatch app, which you can download for free in the App Store. Now this is

utilizing the iPhone 16 Pro camera and LiDAR sensors to build a 3D model of my site. So I'm walking around this vacant pharmacy, and you can see here we're capturing data and creating a point cloud down here in the preview. I'm

going to come back here to get this sidewalk because we will survey this with our Total Station. Okay, wrapping around to the other side of the building now. What a point cloud is, is just points that are generated from the scan data, and we are now just going around this drive-thru,

capturing as much detail to put into our point cloud. You can see there's our 3D model; very nice! I love how that's turning out, and we can even see a live view of the data being collected here using the iPhone 16 Pro camera and LiDAR

sensor. And all of this data will be extracted, and we'll be able to do a point-to-point comparison using a high-accuracy surveying Total Station. All right, and coming around here one last turn, we are going to finalize the scan and have a completed point cloud 3D

model generated from our iPhone 16 Pro. I'm going to go ahead and get this part of the curb because I will survey that with the Total Station to get a complete survey. Now, one of the things I want to point out with the Pix4Dcatch app is

That there is an algorithm to help close out mapping. So, as you can see here, I'm going to come back to where we started, finish scanning by overlapping some of what we already scanned and watch down in the preview here. Watch as it clips it into place, perfect, just like that. All

Right now, I can hit pause and end the scan. And now, if we take a look at the point cloud generated from the LiDAR sensor, we can see the entire building all the way around. And thanks to the Pix4Dcatch app, it was able to minimize our

drifting error by recalculating the trajectories in order for this project to close, so we have a complete building. Thanks to just using our iPhone 16 Pro. All right, now let's survey this using a total station. Now to start, we're going to need to establish a control network

by setting up three control points using a GNSS receiver. We're going to have geodetic coordinates for when we set up our total station. Now, since the building is square-shaped, the best approach would be to set up two control points that we can set up our total station on in order

to observe all four sides of the building. However, we are going to need a point that we can reference as a backsight. So, establishing a third control point that we can see from both setups is critical in order to tie the data collected from both setups. And so I

think right here is probably a good spot for the first point. This way we can see these two faces of the building. In order to do our survey, going to add a little bit of ribbon there. We go. All right. And then right here is probably a good spot for

The second control point, so I'm probably going to set it right over [Music] here. Okay, looking good. Good. And then finally, I'm going to set a point here where I have a clear line of sight to the backsight from the first point and a

clear line of sight to the backsight from the second point. All right, there we go. All right, now we're going to use a GNSS receiver to measure all of these control points. I'm using the Leica GS118i with its multi-frequency channels and high

precision GNSS observation capabilities. This is going to give us latitude and longitude coordinates that we will then project into state plane coordinates. I'm using NAD83, Michigan South, with my units being international feet. All right, and now we can finally begin surveying using the total station.

Now, I know surveying can be a little intimidating, and the various technologies that we use to work can be a little tricky. Not to mention the lack of resources available to help you understand how surveying works, and without the proper guidance, you're going

to have a very difficult time incorporating it into your work. Finding knowledge about surveying is difficult enough; what about the reliability of that information? Where is the support? Where is the mentorship? Where is the peer review? All things that are missing from the survey education system, and

well, this is why SurveySchool.com is the fastest-growing survey community, providing courses, live coaching calls, interactive quizzes, and lab demonstrations, as well as a place to network and build your business as you advance your surveying knowledge. Look, I spent my entire life learning about

Surveying, from when I was just a teenager working with my dad, to the years I spent at university getting my Bachelor of Science in surveying engineering, and even now while I'm doing my PhD at Ohio State, I have never seen an online surveying community that is as

engaged and thriving as the Survey School. And honestly, the best part about the Survey School are the industry partners. As students level up in the Survey School, they have the ability to access premium products like photogrammetry software and GNSS receivers absolutely for free. That's

right; students are getting free gifts from companies just for learning more about surveying and getting involved in the industry. These companies are giving them the tools that they need to use in the future and to support them as they continue down the journey of becoming a surveyor. We've got 200 seats available,

so be sure to click on the link down in the description and sign up for the Survey School and begin to expand your knowledge with like-minded people from around the world. All right, so we've got the Leica TS16 Total Station set up. If I tap on

view and edit data, these are the three control points that we measured with the GS18. Now, the setup method is going to be a known backsight, and then under Point ID, I'm going to select Point number one, because that is where the total station is

set up. Next, we have the instrument height, so it looks like the height of the instrument is 4.939 ft. All right, so now we need to set the orientation on our backsight, so we'll head over there to observe that point. All right, so I'm holding this

Point the backside.  ID, we have it set to point number three for the target height. All I have to do is look at the side of my rod and I can see it is set to 1.85 m or 6.07 ft. All right, and so now all we have

to do is come up here to the top and tell the total station to power search for us, lock to target. Okay, perfect. So now we are locked to target; everything looks good. I'm going to go ahead and take a distance, and there it is. Our air levels

horizontally, we are right on, and in the vertical we're only off by hundredths of a foot; that's equivalent to 6 mm. I'm going to click on 'set.' Okay, and so now the total station, no matter where I go, is going to follow this prism, which will

allow me to do the survey all by myself. So I'm going to start surveying back here. I'm going to call this 101. So the first code I'm going to use is just 'C' for concrete. I'm going to measure the corner here of this concrete. Okay, and

I'm going to hit 'measure point, store.' Cool. All right. Next point I'm going to choose is 'top of curb,' and I want to edit this to be a beginning of a line. All right, and I'm going to hit 'measure point, store.' Come down over here, switch over to

'gutter beginning.' Okay, hold this plumb and hit 'measure.' Awesome. Store. Store. Awesome. Store. Store. Cool. And if I just simply zoom in here and take a look at these points, you can see I'm starting to form the curb and gutter lines for

The site – let's go ahead and continue measuring points with the total station. Back of curb, measure gutter. Okay, this is going to be top of curb down here, gutter. Top of curb here, we've got the gutter. This will be gutter, top of curb, top of curb, and down here the gutter.

Shots nice! So we've got these nice-looking arcs to simulate the arc that we have here. Down at the bottom here: gutter, top of curb, top of curb, down here gutter. Good gutter shot, top of curb and gutter. Look at that beautiful alignment work! Gutter measure, top of curb. Okay, down

here, I'm going to measure gutter and up here is going to be top of curb. Back over here we're going to do a concrete shot, so concrete measure. Do a couple more gutter shots here for this little arc. Same for the top of curb; it's going to

be a gutter shot. Top of curb, this one will be concrete, and we'll take one single concrete shot right here. From just our first setup, we've gotten all of this data. I must say it did turn out really, really nice. We've done all the

surveying we can from this setup. So what I'm going to do now is move the total station to point number two, which we set over there in order to finish surveying the rest of this building. Okay, so I've got the total station set up here on

point number two. Now our backsight point is still going to be point number three, so let's go ahead and hold the backsight point that we held last time. Okay, here we go. Point number three. Okay, and I'm going to hit distance. Okay, looks like we

are right on in the horizontal and about 500mm in the vertical, so I'm happy with this and I'm willing to accept these conditions. So I'm going to hit 'set' now. Let's wrap up the rest of the survey. I'm going to say 'measure'; we'll do the same

here for gutter and top of curb. Here, I was able to get this island and then the drive-thru of the old pharmacy: concrete top of curb, gutter, gutter here, top of curb, concrete top of curb, the end of the gutter. We're done with this entire

side of the building; one more side to go. Top of curb down here will be gutter to gutter, top of curb and then concrete. Measure top of curb, measure gutter, top of curb, final concrete shot. Perfect! All right, so we're done collecting data with the prism now.

I'm going to use the reflectorless option to measure the building itself so that we can find the position of the building using the total station on the controller. I'm going to switch over to 'any surface' and I'm also going to turn on the laser so you can see now there is

a laser that comes out so you can see right here. I'm pointing the laser at the camera lens. This looks good. I'm going to hit 'measure,' hit 'measure.' You can see the building line being created here. There we go, and 'measure' now. Yes, I did forget to do this in the other

setup, so I'm going to quickly set up the total station over there and collect the rest of the building corners so that we have a full survey drawing with the total station. All right, so now we are set up back on point number one. You can

Look at, like, a captivate here, and we're going to continue the building line. All right, and measure point store. There we go. Looks good to me. Measure point store. Focus here. Okay, measure that. Looks really good; I like that. Then we're going to close out the

shape here and measure. Awesome! So there we go. Now we've got all corners of the building, and so now it's time to take the data that we got with our iPhone 16 Pro and analyze the accuracy in comparison to a surveying total station. All right, now

let's process all of the data and see our results. Now, I've already gone ahead and processed all of the data, and if you're interested in seeing how we process the data that comes out of the iPhone 16 Pro, I made this 1-hour video

over at the Survey School. It goes into extreme detail about how we process photogrammetry data, how we fuse the point cloud, and then extracting the line work out of that point cloud in order to import it into Civil 3D. So if you're

at all interested in how that process looks, then I highly encourage you to check this video out over at thesurveyingschool.com. Now that we've processed that data, I want to show you how it compares to the total station, and this right here is the iPhone data on top of the total

station data. Now, this is the absolute position that was calculated from the iPhone 16 Pro using the consumer-grade GPS on the phone. But overall, just taking a quick look at this, you can see that it at least lands in the right spot. Sure, the rotation of the project is slightly

Off, and if I were to just quickly calculate the differences in terms of the absolute position, you can see the building corner is about 12 1/2 feet off over in the southwest. If I were to take a look at the position of this curb,

looks like we're 9.74 feet off over by the entrance. The corner of this building is about 3.25 feet off. So, in terms of absolute accuracy, we're finding a range of 1 to 4 meters. And again, we're talking about consumer-grade

GPS; no RTK corrections, nothing to give survey-grade accuracy, just the phone's GPS positioning, which is honestly not that bad. Now, this is the absolute accuracy. I am interested in finding out what the relative accuracy is of the iPhone data. The main difference between relative and

absolute is: absolute positioning is looking for the actual coordinates to match. Relative accuracy is trying to figure out if the model within itself is accurate. And so, to do this, we are going to need to align the data set. So, in order to align the data set, all I'm

going to do is just position it so that it's rotated in the correct spot, it is placed on the same elevation, and that'll just make it a fair comparison when we look at it compared to a total station. We're not influencing the scale of the

project; we're just simply moving and rotating the entire project to align with the data collected with the total station. And so, once we do that alignment, this is how it looks. We can see now this starts to look very similar to the total station data. I do see that the line here

Does take a little bit of a turn; it kind of warps downward compared to the total station, which is completely straight. Great! I also think the building looks a little bit longer than it should be, but other than that, I mean the building line fits right in with the

curb and gutter line. Everything seems to be in the correct location, and for an iPhone data set, this actually doesn't look half bad. Now I created two different surfaces: one for the total station and one for the iPhone, using the curb, gutter, and the concrete shots, and

if we take a look at the contour lines, we can see that they look very similar. This is the contour line at the entrance of the building using the total station, and this is the exact same location with the iPhone. Just looking at the same contour line as it's

coming in alongside the curb and gutter on the iPhone, which is matching what we have here on the total station. And even up here, running along the curb and the gutter, we see the same thing with the total station. So, just from an initial look at the surface, the contours of the

iPhone 16 Pro are very similar to that of the total station. So, very good start! I love what I see, um, but I want to see numbers. So what I did was I extracted 23 points from the iPhone data set. Now, these 23 points have corresponding

points over on the total station, and I've created a little sketch so that you know where these points are located. And, yeah, generally speaking, these are the points that we're going to use to assess the relative accuracy of the iPhone 16 Pro data set, and I'm going to show you

The tables we have set up here explain how we'll find the relative error in the iPhone data set.  These are the 23 points and their X, Y, and Z coordinates.  As a reminder, we did move this data set

to perform alignment. It originally looked like this, but we're now working with this.  The state plane coordinates in the iPhone data set are irrelevant; I'm only looking at the differences between X, Y, and Z. This brings us to the next

set of tables. These two tables show the coordinate differences between two points. We'll find the differences in northing, easting, and elevation between two points in the total station data set and then in the iPhone data set. Then,

we'll find the difference between the total station and the iPhone data. We'll take the differences within the points and find the differences of those differences in X, Y, and Z. Then we'll find the

2D root mean square error and the 3D root mean square error. For my metric-using colleagues, we'll convert everything to centimeters. All right, let's get started. I'll begin by comparing two points that are close together—points 2 and 3. Here in Kogo, I'll select 2-3, and we'll take the differences in northing. So here's 3 minus 2, and then...

Over and give us X, Y, and Z. I'll then copy this over here, and then it'll do the same thing on the iPhone data set. There it is—all these differences. And then up here, we are then taking the differences of the differences, so here...

we go Y, X, and then Z. And then this formula is the formula for 2D RMSE, so just X and Y values, and then we convert this over to centimeters. And then the same thing over here, but this time we include Z to get the 3D, and then also converted to

centimeters. So it looks like the iPhone data set is about 1/10th different in terms of elevation change between the curb and gutter over in the northeast corner, which is about 4 cm. If you just look at 2D, it's 0.08, which, okay, I mean,

it's not too bad. All right, let's do something a little bit more complex. I think let's take the building right here and find the difference between 1 and 4. And if we take a look at the differences here, oh, it looks like we've

got 1 foot in the northing and then 2 and 1/4 of a foot in the easting. So the discrepancy is a little bit higher here. All right, let's do something else. Let's um, look at the difference between six

and seven. So these two curb and gutter shots. Okay, so it looks like the difference in elevation is 7 hundredths, which isn't too bad, but the difference in X, which is the easting, is about 3/10. So that's giving us an overall error of

about 3/10 of a foot in both 2D and 3D. Let's do this curb shot all the way down to this curb shot. So, 8 to 13, looks like we're traveling about 112 feet. Okay, so when we travel a little over 100 feet, we are

getting an error of about 3 feet. We are traveling 100 feet, so I I I anticipate that there's going to be some drift in there, and that's what's causing that error to happen. So okay, it's good to see that. I want to do the concrete slab 15

to 17, and it looks like we are, yep, around 7/10 in the Y, 3/10 in the X. The Z has been really good, actually, the last several shots. The vertical difference has been under a tenth of a foot. So in

this instance, we're about 8/8, which is roughly 25 cm. I would attribute this to the LiDAR sensor that's on the phone because it definitely helps calculate the depths. All right, let's do another building corner, so from 12 to 23, and

we've got a difference of 2 feet in both X and Y. Wow, that's interesting. Vertical is about 2/10 of a foot. So our overall RMSE is about 2 1/2 feet or 76 cm. All right, let's do this curb gutter shot here, so

21 to 22. All right, here we go. This is what I'm talking about. We got hundredths of a foot in the Y, 6 hundredths in the X, and only 8 hundredths in the vertical. So the vertical being the worst, which

Honestly, the most critical difference is between the curb and gutter. But yeah, overall, in 2D space, we've got 600ths of a foot, which is really good. And then in 3D space, we're about a tenth—so we're between 2 and 3 cm of error.

Now I want to measure the curb difference between point number 21 and point number 2.  Actually, we take a look at the curb, which is a ground feature. Um, we're actually getting less error than we did when we measured the building at 112 ft. We might as well measure the building

corners as well. From 1 to 23, it looks like the error is relatively close in terms of X, but we do see quite a bit more error in Y. So it looks like when you measure buildings, you do see more error than when you measure

ground features like curbs and gutters. Now I want to see the differences between the two elevation shots in the front, between 10 and 11. And again, there are no X and Y values here, just Z. Oh, nice! So it looks like between 10 and 11, we've

actually got the same thing. But when I'm looking at the total station, it's 300ths of a foot in the positive direction, but on the iPhone, it's in the negative direction. So really, um, it's 600ths of a foot in point two difference, so it's

giving us about 2 cm of error, which is not terrible; that's actually pretty good. But again, it's a short distance. Okay. And then just for fun, let's do one more—one more—and I want to just do two really extreme points here. Let's do point number 3

And then, all the way at the bottom here, let's do Point number 17. So this is the longest distance that we have on the project, okay? And we've got about 3 ft in the X and in the Y, but only a tenth in

the vertical. That's pretty impressive. I'm actually quite shocked that that's the relative error. But yeah, but because of those errors in the 2D, we've got about 4 ft of error, which is equivalent to 122 cm. So what I can tell you is that

the iPhone 16 Pro is capable of achieving about 2 ft of accuracy over the span of about 100 ft. And while the iPhone is not designed to be a mapping tool, utilizing it for such experiments is such a great way to research how we

can use mobile devices in order to do surveying work. I hope you guys enjoyed the video. If you did, please, please, please consider subscribing to the YouTube channel to learn more about surveying. And if you're looking to elevate your survey knowledge and take

it up to the next level, then consider joining the Survey School where you can work hand-in-hand with me and other like-minded individuals to unlock your surveying potential. Thanks guys for watching, and I'll see you next time.

iPhone 16 Pro LiDAR and Camera vs Survey Total Station Accuracy

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