Design and Evaluation of a Permanently Installed Plane-Based Calibration Field for Mobile Laser Scanning Systems

Abstract

Mobile laser scanning has become an established measuring technique that is used for many applications in the fields of mapping, inventory, and monitoring. Due to the increasing operationality of such systems, quality control w.r.t. calibration and evaluation of the systems becomes more and more important and is subject to on-going research. This paper contributes to this topic by using tools from geodetic configuration analysis in order to design and evaluate a plane-based calibration field for determining the lever arm and boresight angles of a 2D laser scanner w.r.t. a GNSS/IMU unit (Global Navigation Satellite System, Inertial Measurement Unit). In this regard, the impact of random, systematic, and gross observation errors on the calibration is analyzed leading to a plane setup that provides accurate and controlled calibration parameters. The designed plane setup is realized in the form of a permanently installed calibration field. The applicability of the calibration field is tested with a real mobile laser scanning system by frequently repeating the calibration. Empirical standard deviations of <1 ... 1.5 mm for the lever arm and <0.005 ∘ for the boresight angles are obtained, which was priorly defined to be the goal of the calibration. In order to independently evaluate the mobile laser scanning system after calibration, an evaluation environment is realized consisting of a network of control points as well as TLS (Terrestrial Laser Scanning) reference point clouds. Based on the control points, both the horizontal and vertical accuracy of the system is found to be < 10 mm (root mean square error). This is confirmed by comparisons to the TLS reference point clouds indicating a well calibrated system. Both the calibration field and the evaluation environment are permanently installed and can be used for arbitrary mobile laser scanning systems.

Improving trajectory estimation using 3D city models and kinematic point clouds

“…The trajectory parameters (position and orientation) from the GNSS/IMU were then used to register all scan points to a globally consistent georeferenced point cloud. Taking the uncertainty of the GNSS/IMU unit into account, this results in a point cloud accuracy of the order of a few centimeters (Heinz, Holst, Kuhlmann, & Klingbeil, 2020). This highly accurate point cloud was taken as ground truth for the labeling of street and facade points used in the classification task described in Section 3.…”

Fast Positioning Model and Systematic Error Calibration of Chang’E-3 Obstacle Avoidance Lidar for Soft Landing

“…It has been widely used to calibrate intrinsic and mounting parameters of static, vehicle-borned, and airborne LiDAR [ 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ]. Heinz et al investigated the design of a planar-based permanent calibration field and used I for the geometric calibration of vehicle-borned LiDAR [ 13 ]. Another focus of LiDAR geometric calibration research is to determine the error models that describes systematic errors, which can be divided into physical and empirical models.…”