HYBRID MODELS FOR TRAJECTORY ERROR MODELLING IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract. This paper tackles the first step of any strategy aiming to improve the trajectory of terrestrial mobile mapping systems in urban environments. We present an approach to model the error of terrestrial mobile mapping trajectories, combining deterministic and stochastic models. Due to urban specific environment, the deterministic component will be modelled with non-continuous functions composed by linear shifts, drifts or polynomial functions. In addition, we will introduce a stochastic error component for modelling residual noise of the trajectory error function.

First step for error modelling requires to know the actual trajectory error values for several representative environments. In order to determine as accurately as possible the trajectories error, (almost) error less trajectories should be estimated using extracted nonsemantic features from a sequence of images collected with the terrestrial mobile mapping system and from a full set of ground control points. Once the references are estimated, they will be used to determine the actual errors in terrestrial mobile mapping trajectory. The rigorous analysis of these data sets will allow us to characterize the errors of a terrestrial mobile mapping system for a wide range of environments. This information will be of great use in future campaigns to improve the results of the 3D points cloud generation.

The proposed approach has been evaluated using real data. The data originate from a mobile mapping campaign over an urban and controlled area of Dortmund (Germany), with harmful GNSS conditions. The mobile mapping system, that includes two laser scanner and two cameras, was mounted on a van and it was driven over a controlled area around three hours. The results show the suitability to decompose trajectory error with non-continuous deterministic and stochastic components.