LEICA DMC III CALIBRATION AND GEOMETRIC SENSOR ACCURACY

Abstract. As an evolution of the successful DMC II digital camera series, Leica Geosystems has introduced the Leica DMC III digital aerial camera using, for the first time in the industry, a large-format CMOS sensor as a panchromatic high-resolution camera head. This paper describes the Leica DMC III calibration and its quality assurance and quality control (QA/QC) procedures. It will explain how calibration was implemented within the production process for the Leica DMC III camera. Based on many years of experience with the DMC and DMC II camera series, it is know that the sensor flatness has a huge influence on the final achievable results. The Leica DMC III panchromatic CMOS sensor with its 100.3mm x 56.9mm size shows remaining errors in a range of 0.1 to 0.2μm for the root mean square and shows maximum values not higher that 1.0μm. The Leica DMC III is calibrated based on a 5cm Ground Sample Distance (GSD) grid pattern flight and evaluated with three different flying heights at 5cm, 8cm and 11cm GSD. The geometric QA/QC has been performed using the calibration field area, as well as using an independent test field. The geometric performance and accuracy is unique and gives ground accuracies far better than the flown GSD.