Alternative methodologies for the quality control of LiDAR systems.

摘要

The ever improving capabilities of GNSS/INS direct geo-referencing technology is having a positive impact on the widespread adoption of LiDAR systems for the acquisition of dense and accurate surface models over extended areas. Unlike with photogrammetric techniques, derived footprints from a LiDAR system are not based on redundant measurements, which are manipulated in an adjustment procedure. Consequently, there are no associated measures (e.g., variance component of unit weight and variance-covariance matrices of the derived parameters) that can be used to evaluate the quality of the final product. In this regard, a LiDAR system is usually viewed as a black box that lacks a well defined set of quality control procedures. This research introduces alternative procedures for evaluating the internal quality of LiDAR data. However, these procedures could be used for external quality control as well. The main premise of the proposed methodologies is that overlapping LiDAR strips will represent the same surface if and only if there are no biases in the derived surfaces. Therefore, the quality of coincidence between overlapping strips will be used as the basis for deriving the quality control measures.