摘要： The measurement of earthwork excavation in hydropower project construction is an important control process in engineering construction. The traditional measurement and calculation process is not only inefficient, but also easy to cause errors. In this paper, the 3D laser scanner is applied to continuously measure the excavation process of the soil material yard and the efficient processing method of registration, compression and extraction process of excavation point cloud data is established respectively. At the same time, two fast calculation methods of excavation volume based on point cloud data are established. The practical application proves the data processing method established in this paper can shorten the data processing time by more than 80%, and ensure the accuracy of the data, and can control the calculation error of the excavation volume within 1%.