Foundations for Strip Adjustment of Airborne Laserscanning Data with Conformal Geometric Algebra

Typically, airborne laserscanning includes a laser mounted on an airplane or drone (its pulsed beam direction can scan in flight direction and perpendicular to it) an intertial positioning system of gyroscopes, and a global navigation satellite system. The data, relative orientation and relative distance of these three systems are combined in computing strips of ground surface point locations in an earth fixed coordinate system. Finally, all laserscanning strips are combined via iterative closest point methods to an interactive three-dimensional terrain map. In this work we describe the mathematical framework for how to use the iterative closest point method for the adjustment of the airborne laserscanning data strips in the framework of conformal geometric algebra.