Abstract
Accurate, photorealistic, and operationally actionable 3D campus mapping is a key enabler for smart educational environments, which refers to digitally enabled campuses that integrate spatial data to support navigation, facility management, and infrastructure monitoring. This paper presents an end-to-end, replicable UAV workflow that combines RGB photogrammetry from multi-view imagery and UAV LiDAR point clouds to construct a high-fidelity 3D campus model of King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) as a case study. Data were collected using a DJI Matrice 300 RTK equipped with a Zenmuse P1 (45 MP) camera and Zenmuse L2 LiDAR payload, with nadir grid flights (80%/70% overlap) and oblique orbits (~ 45°) at 60 m altitude (RGB GSD ≈ 2.5 cm/pixel; LiDAR mean spacing ≈ 5 cm). LiDAR scans were georeferenced and cleaned, then co-registered with the photogrammetric reconstruction in a common RTK frame. To improve visual realism without altering metric geometry, a lightweight 2× U-Net super-resolution module (U-NetSR) was applied only to the RGB textures used for mesh texturing. Experiments show that combining nadir and oblique views improves facade completeness and reduces surface deviation by ~ 30% relative to nadir-only acquisition, while super-resolved textures increase SSIM (0.88→0.93) and edge sharpness (~ 28%) at a modest post-processing cost. Finally, the model is exported to a WebGIS environment for interactive 3D exploration and campus-operations integration.
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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals and Interdisciplinary Research Center for Aviation & Space Exploration.
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The authors disclose that King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals and Interdisciplinary Research Center for Aviation & Space Exploration funds this work.
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H.K.: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Methodology, Project administration, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing–review & editing. Ayman A.: Investigation, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing– review & editing. S.A.: Methodology, Visualization, Writing–review & editing. Abdullah A.: Investigation, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing–original draft.
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Keshk, H.M., Abdallah, A.M., Almutairi, S. et al. UAV photogrammetry and lidar integration for high-fidelity 3D campus mapping at KFUPM. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-39888-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-39888-4
