Abstract
Abstract. The extrinsic calibration of a Mobile Laser Scanning system aims to determine the relative orientation between a laser scanner and a sensor that estimates the exterior orientation of the sensor system. The relative orientation is one component that limits the accuracy of a 3D point cloud which is captured with a Mobile Laser Scanning system. The most efficient way to determine the relative orientation of a Mobile Laser Scanning system is using a self-calibration approach as this avoids the need to perform an additional calibration beforehand. Instead, the system can be calibrated automatically during data acquisition. The entropy-based self-calibration fits into this category and is utilized in this contribution. In this contribution, we analyze the impact of four different trajectories on the result of the entropy-based self-calibration, namely (i) uni-directional, (ii) ortho-directional, (iii) bi-directional, and (iv) multi-directional trajectory. Theoretical considerations are supported by experiments performed with the publicly available MLS 1 – TUM City Campus data set. The investigations show that strong variations of the yaw angle in a confined space or bidirectional trajectories as well as the variation of the height of the laser scanner are beneficial for calibration.
Highlights
To obtain a detailed 3D representation of the environment, Laser Scanning, known as Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR), is a very effective and accurate technique
We analyze the impact of the trajectory on the extrinsic calibration result based on reflecting theoretical considerations and supporting these with real data experiments
The experiments show that the underlying trajectory has a large impact on the calibration result
Summary
To obtain a detailed 3D representation of the environment, Laser Scanning, known as Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR), is a very effective and accurate technique. It can be applied on different scale levels. Airborne Laser Scanning, for example, often is used to create a Digital Terrain Model and a Digital Surface Model, respectively, on a regional scale. Laser Scanning is, for instance, used to generate 3D city models, building models or models of indoor environments. For this purpose, different mobile platforms like vehicles, Unmanned Areal Vehicles (UAVs), or even smaller robots to navigate indoors can be utilized
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