Test Charts for Evaluating Imaging and Point Cloud Quality of Mobile Mapping Systems for Urban Street Space Acquisition

Norbert Pfeifer,Andreas Bayr,Lothar Eysn,Johannes Falkner,Camillo Ressl

doi:10.3390/rs13020237

Abstract

Mobile mapping is in the process of becoming a routinely applied standard tool to support administration of cities. For ensuring the usability of the mobile mapping data it is necessary to have a practical method to evaluate the quality of different systems, which reaches beyond 3D accuracy of individual points. Such a method must be objective, easy to implement, and provide quantitative results to be used in tendering processes. We present such an approach which extracts quality figures for point density, point distribution, point cloud planarity, image resolution, and street sign legibility. In its practical application for the mobile mapping campaign of the City of Vienna (Austria) in 2020 the proposed test method proved to fulfill the above requirements. As an additional result, quality figures are reported for the panorama images and point clouds of three different mobile mapping systems.

Highlights

Mobile mapping technology has proven itself as part of an efficient and modern city administration [1,2], and the acquired data are an informative carrier of information at the street level
Quality figures are reported for the panorama images and point clouds of three different mobile mapping systems
We presented test charts for mobile mapping images and point clouds

Summary

Introduction

Mobile mapping technology has proven itself as part of an efficient and modern city administration [1,2], and the acquired data are an informative carrier of information at the street level. The processed data, published in a web-based viewing system, can be used to gain digital information with respect to administrative tasks within the public space. Examples for such tasks are simple 3D distance measurements, a visual inspection of the local situation or digitization of urban furniture such as street signs, advertisement boards, and park benches. To realize the above potential for urban administration, mobile mapping needs to fulfill requirements on data quality [5].

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion