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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-XLIX-B1-2026-83-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>An RTK-SLAM Dataset for Absolute Accuracy Evaluation in GNSS-Degraded Environments</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Zhang</surname>
<given-names>Wei</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Ress</surname>
<given-names>Vincent</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Skuddis</surname>
<given-names>David</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Soergel</surname>
<given-names>Uwe</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Haala</surname>
<given-names>Norbert</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Institute for Photogrammetry and Geoinformatics, University of Stuttgart, Germany</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>22</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>XLIX-B1-2026</volume>
<fpage>83</fpage>
<lpage>91</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Wei Zhang et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B1-2026/83/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B1-2026-83-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B1-2026/83/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B1-2026-83-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B1-2026/83/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B1-2026-83-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLIX-B1-2026/83/2026/isprs-archives-XLIX-B1-2026-83-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>RTK-SLAM systems integrate simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) with real-time kinematic (RTK) GNSS positioning, promising both relative consistency and globally referenced coordinates for efficient georeferenced surveying. A critical and underappreciated issue is that the standard evaluation metric, Absolute Trajectory Error (ATE), first fits an optimal rigid-body transformation between the estimated trajectory and reference before computing errors. This so-called SE(3) alignment absorbs global drift and systematic errors, making trajectories appear more accurate than they are in practice, and is unsuitable for evaluating the global accuracy of RTK-SLAM. We present a geodetically referenced dataset and evaluation methodology that expose this gap. A key design principle is that the RTK receiver is used solely as a system input, while ground truth is established independently via a geodetic total station. This separation is absent from all existing datasets, where GNSS typically serves as (part of) the ground truth. The dataset is collected using a handheld RTK-SLAM device across two representative scenes, covering diverse GNSS conditions, including open-sky, building-obstructed areas, underpasses, outdoor-to-indoor transitions, and indoor environments. We evaluate LiDAR-inertial, visual-inertial, and LiDAR-visual-inertial RTK-SLAM systems alongside standalone RTK, reporting direct global accuracy and SE(3)-aligned relative accuracy to make the gap explicit. Results show that SE(3) alignment can underestimate absolute positioning error by up to 76%. RTK-SLAM achieves centimeter-level absolute accuracy in open-sky conditions and maintains decimeter-level global accuracy indoors, where standalone RTK degrades to tens of meters. The dataset, calibration files, and evaluation scripts are publicly available at &lt;code&gt;https://rtk-slam-dataset.github.io/&lt;/code&gt;.</p>
</abstract>
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