Scanline survey is a discontinuity survey that traditionally involves scanning a rock surface or an outcrop with a horizontal line drawn over the rock surface, and all the properties of rock mass such as spacing, persistence, orientation, etc. are measured.

Spacing is the consecutive distance between two discontinuities in a rock mass. It defines the relative block size of a rock mass and is an important parameter in assessing rock mass quality.

Stereonets are used to plot the orientation of geological structures graphically and takes three dimensional 3-D orientation information and project it down to a two dimensional 2-D surface. It is based on two principles. Principle of equal angle and equal area. Equal angle net is called Wulff net and equal area net is called Schmidt net.

Structure from motion (SfM) is a photogrammetric method that reconstructs a 3D model from a set of 2D overlapping image sequences.