STUDY ON IMPROVEMENT OF ACCURACY IN INERTIAL PHOTOGRAMMETRY BY COMBINING IMAGES WITH INERTIAL MEASUREMENT UNIT

Abstract. Inertial photogrammetry is defined as photogrammetry that involves using a camera on which an inertial measurement unit (IMU) is mounted. In inertial photogrammetry, the position and inclination of a shooting camera are calculated using the IMU. An IMU is characterized by error growth caused by time accumulation because acceleration is integrated with respect to time.

This study examines the procedure to estimate the position of the camera accurately while shooting using the IMU and the structure from motion (SfM) technology, which is applied in many fields, such as computer vision.

When neither the coordinates of the position of the camera nor those of feature points are known, SfM provides a similar positional relationship between the position of the camera and feature points. Therefore, the actual length of positional coordinates is not determined. If the actual length of the position of the camera is unknown, the camera acceleration is obtained by calculating the second order differential of the position of the camera, with respect to the shooting time. The authors had determined the actual length by assigning the position of IMU to the SfM-calculated position. Hence, accuracy decreased because of the error growth, which was the characteristic feature of IMU. In order to solve this problem, a new calculation method was proposed. Using this method, the difference between the IMU-calculated acceleration and the camera-calculated acceleration can be obtained using the method of least squares, and the magnification required for calculating the actual dimension from the position of the camera can be obtained. The actual length can be calculated by multiplying all the SfM point groups by the obtained magnification factor. This calculation method suppresses the error growth, which is due to the time accumulation in IMU, and improves the accuracy of inertial photogrammetry.