Bundle Adjustment of Spherical Images Acquired with a Portable Panoramic Image Mapping System (PPIMS)

Abstract Thanks to the development of mobile mapping technologies, close-range photogrammetry ( crp ) has advanced to be an efficient mapping method for a variety of applications. A compact crp system equipped with multiple cameras and a gps receiver is one of those advanced portable mapping systems. A portable panoramic image mapping system ( ppms ) was specially designed to capture panoramic images with eight cameras and to obtain the position of image station with a gps receiver. A ppims can be considered as a panoramic crp system. The coordinates of an object point can be determined by the intersection of panoramic image points. For the implementation, we propose a new concept of photogrammetry by using panoramic images. Eight images captured by ppims forms a spherical panorama image ( spi ). Instead of using the original images, ppims spi s are then used for photogrammetric triangulation and mapping. Under this circumstance, one spi is formed for each station, and it is associated with only one set of exterior orientation ( eo ) parameters. Traditional collinearity equations are not applicable to spi triangulation and mapping. Therefore, a novel bundle adjustment algorithm is proposed to solve eo of multi-station spi s. Because ppims spi s are not ideal spi s, a correction scheme was also developed to correct the imperfect geometry of ppims spi . Two test studies were performed for the data collected at a campus test field of National Cheng Kung University ( ncku ) and at a historical site of Tainan. Both cases demonstrate the feasibility of spi bundle adjustment and applying corrections for ppims spi s necessary for effective for bundle adjustment. Furthermore, the experiment's results also confirm that spi s can replace original images for ppims triangulation.