Rigorous Strip Adjustment of UAV-based Laserscanning Data Including Time-Dependent Correction of Trajectory Errors

Abstract A new generation of laser scanners mounted on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ( uav s) have the potential to provide highquality point clouds of comparatively small areas (a few hectares). The high maneuverability of the uav s, a typically large field of view of the laser scanners, and a comparatively small measurement range lead to point clouds with very high point density, less occlusions, and low measurement noise. However, due to the limited payload of uav s, lightweight navigation sensors with a moderate level of accuracy are used to estimate the platform’s trajectory. As a consequence, the georeferencing quality of the point clouds is usually sub-optimal; for this, strip adjustment can be performed. The main goal of strip adjustment is to simultaneously optimize the relative and absolute orientation of the strip-wise collected point clouds. This is done by fully re-calibrating the laser scanning system and by correcting systematic measurement errors of the trajectory. In this paper, we extend our previous work on the topic of strip adjustment by the estimation of time-dependent trajectory errors. The errors are thereby modelled by natural cubic splines with constant segment length in time domain. First results confirm the suitability of this flexible correction model by reducing the relative and absolute strip discrepancies to 1.38 cm and 1.65 cm, respectively.