Accuracy evaluation of 3D lidar data from small UAV
2015
A UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) with an integrated lidar can be an efficient system for collection of high-resolution
and accurate three-dimensional (3D) data. In this paper we evaluate the accuracy of a system consisting of a lidar sensor
on a small UAV. High geometric accuracy in the produced point cloud is a fundamental qualification for detection and
recognition of objects in a single-flight dataset as well as for change detection using two or several data collections over
the same scene. Our work presented here has two purposes: first to relate the point cloud accuracy to data processing
parameters and second, to examine the influence on accuracy from the UAV platform parameters. In our work, the
accuracy is numerically quantified as local surface smoothness on planar surfaces, and as distance and relative height
accuracy using data from a terrestrial laser scanner as reference. The UAV lidar system used is the Velodyne HDL-32E
lidar on a multirotor UAV with a total weight of 7 kg. For processing of data into a geographically referenced point
cloud, positioning and orientation of the lidar sensor is based on inertial navigation system (INS) data combined with
lidar data. The combination of INS and lidar data is achieved in a dynamic calibration process that minimizes the
navigation errors in six degrees of freedom, namely the errors of the absolute position (x, y, z) and the orientation (pitch,
roll, yaw) measured by GPS/INS. Our results show that low-cost and light-weight MEMS based
(microelectromechanical systems) INS equipment with a dynamic calibration process can obtain significantly improved
accuracy compared to processing based solely on INS data.
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