scholarly journals Investigating Practical Impacts of Using Single-Antenna and Dual-Antenna GNSS/INS Sensors in UAS-Lidar Applications

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (16) ◽  
pp. 5382
Author(s):  
Ryan G. Brazeal ◽  
Benjamin E. Wilkinson ◽  
Adam R. Benjamin

Data collected from a moving lidar sensor can produce an accurate digital representation of the physical environment that is scanned, provided the time-dependent positions and orientations of the lidar sensor can be determined. The most widely used approach to determining these positions and orientations is to collect data with a GNSS/INS sensor. The use of dual-antenna GNSS/INS sensors within commercial UAS-lidar systems is uncommon due to the higher cost and more complex installation of the GNSS antennas. This study investigates the impacts of using a single-antenna and dual-antenna GNSS/INS MEMS-based sensor on the positional precision of a UAS-lidar generated point cloud, with an emphasis on the different heading determination techniques employed by each type of GNSS/INS sensor. Specifically, the impacts that sensor velocity and acceleration (single-antenna), and a GNSS compass (dual-antenna) have on heading precision are investigated. Results indicate that at the slower flying speeds often used by UAS (≤5 m/s), a dual-antenna GNSS/INS sensor can improve heading precision by up to a factor of five relative to a single-antenna GNSS/INS sensor, and that a point of diminishing returns for the improvement of heading precision exists at a flying speed of approximately 15 m/s for single-antenna GNSS/INS sensors. Additionally, a simple estimator for the expected heading precision of a single-antenna GNSS/INS sensor based on flying speed is presented. Utilizing UAS-lidar mapping systems with dual-antenna GNSS/INS sensors provides reliable, robust, and higher precision heading estimates, resulting in point clouds with higher accuracy and precision.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 237
Author(s):  
Norbert Pfeifer ◽  
Johannes Falkner ◽  
Andreas Bayr ◽  
Lothar Eysn ◽  
Camillo Ressl

Mobile mapping is in the process of becoming a routinely applied standard tool to support administration of cities. For ensuring the usability of the mobile mapping data it is necessary to have a practical method to evaluate the quality of different systems, which reaches beyond 3D accuracy of individual points. Such a method must be objective, easy to implement, and provide quantitative results to be used in tendering processes. We present such an approach which extracts quality figures for point density, point distribution, point cloud planarity, image resolution, and street sign legibility. In its practical application for the mobile mapping campaign of the City of Vienna (Austria) in 2020 the proposed test method proved to fulfill the above requirements. As an additional result, quality figures are reported for the panorama images and point clouds of three different mobile mapping systems.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bahadır Ergün ◽  
Cumhur Şahin

Currently, as a result of the massive continuous advancements in laser measurement technology, possibilities of map production are broadened, the loss of time and the waste of material sources are highly prevented, and the accuracy and precision of the obtained results are significantly improved. In the view of engineering concept. However, big data which are from laser point clouds have been especially used in the significant procedures of surveying studies. Programming methods are dependent in each studies. In the necessity of the applications, the coding procedure has more efficient, the data of work has increased, and time has been consumed. The coding methods have necessarily been optimized for working together especially in the big data studies. In this section, an automated survey (building facade surveying) is produced from scanning data by means of coding in MatLAB.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (18) ◽  
pp. 3564
Author(s):  
Ansgar Dreier ◽  
Jannik Janßen ◽  
Heiner Kuhlmann ◽  
Lasse Klingbeil

The use of UAV-based laser scanning systems is increasing due to the rapid development in sensor technology, especially in applications such as topographic surveys or forestry. One advantage of these multi-sensor systems is the possibility of direct georeferencing of the derived 3D point clouds in a global reference frame without additional information from Ground Control Points (GCPs). This paper addresses the quality analysis of direct georeferencing of a UAV-based laser scanning system focusing on the absolute accuracy and precision of the system. The system investigated is based on the RIEGL miniVUX-SYS and the evaluation uses the estimated point clouds compared to a reference point cloud from Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) for two different study areas. The precision is estimated by multiple repetitions of the same measurement and the use of artificial objects, such as targets and tables, resulting in a standard deviation of <1.2 cm for the horizontal and vertical directions. The absolute accuracy is determined using a point-based evaluation, which results in the RMSE being <2 cm for the horizontal direction and <4 cm for the vertical direction, compared to the TLS reference. The results are consistent for the two different study areas with similar evaluation approaches but different flight planning and processing. In addition, the influence of different Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) master stations is investigated and no significant difference was found between Virtual Reference Stations (VRS) and a dedicated master station. Furthermore, to control the orientation of the point cloud, a parameter-based analysis using planes in object space was performed, which showed a good agreement with the reference within the noise level of the point cloud. The calculated quality parameters are all smaller than the manufacturer’s specifications and can be transferred to other multi-sensor systems.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (12) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmad Afiq Aiman Abdullah ◽  
Norzailawati Mohd Noor ◽  
Alias Abdullah ◽  
Maisarah Ali ◽  
Muhammad Hadi Mustafa

Malay buildings are synonym with the unique design of full decorative on motive, unique façade design, and roof structured. Most of heritage buildings had been demolished and left out without proper documentation and preserving the building database. Latest mapping systems provide an efficient technique for acquiring dense point clouds in analysing the building structure. This paper aim to explore on the technique acquiring the data for distribution and the façade of building with the Malay architecture design using the laser scanning. Data acquisition was taken for two sites which are Kota Bharu, Kelantan and Alor Setar, Kedah with two different techniques were applied for data collection which are TLS and MLS method. Both methods had succeed in capturing the detail of the features and building in the study area in point cloud form and the analysis of the data was able to analysed on the classification and identification of the Malay building elements and features which still preserved Malay design at the facade and roof element in the study area. As the final results and findings, there were big gaps between the building which still preserved the Malay design in the study area where Kota Bharu recorded 71 units building meanwhile Alor Setar only 15 buildings. The results showed that, most of the Traditional Malay building still being preserved in Kota Bharu compared to Alor Setar.


Author(s):  
K. Kohira ◽  
H. Masuda

A mobile mapping system is effective for capturing dense point-clouds of roads and roadside objects.Point-clouds of urban areas, residential areas, and arterial roads are useful for maintenance of infrastructure, map creation, and automatic driving. However, the data size of point-clouds measured in large areas is enormously large. A large storage capacity is required to store such point-clouds, and heavy loads will be taken on network if point-clouds are transferred through the network. Therefore, it is desirable to reduce data sizes of point-clouds without deterioration of quality. In this research, we propose a novel point-cloud compression method for vehicle-based mobile mapping systems. In our compression method, point-clouds are mapped onto 2D pixels using GPS time and the parameters of the laser scanner. Then, the images are encoded in the Portable Networking Graphics (PNG) format and compressed using the PNG algorithm. In our experiments, our method could efficiently compress point-clouds without deteriorating the quality.


Author(s):  
Jiayong Yu ◽  
Longchen Ma ◽  
Maoyi Tian, ◽  
Xiushan Lu

The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-mounted mobile LiDAR system (ULS) is widely used for geomatics owing to its efficient data acquisition and convenient operation. However, due to limited carrying capacity of a UAV, sensors integrated in the ULS should be small and lightweight, which results in decrease in the density of the collected scanning points. This affects registration between image data and point cloud data. To address this issue, the authors propose a method for registering and fusing ULS sequence images and laser point clouds, wherein they convert the problem of registering point cloud data and image data into a problem of matching feature points between the two images. First, a point cloud is selected to produce an intensity image. Subsequently, the corresponding feature points of the intensity image and the optical image are matched, and exterior orientation parameters are solved using a collinear equation based on image position and orientation. Finally, the sequence images are fused with the laser point cloud, based on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) time index of the optical image, to generate a true color point cloud. The experimental results show the higher registration accuracy and fusion speed of the proposed method, thereby demonstrating its accuracy and effectiveness.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (5) ◽  
pp. 957
Author(s):  
Guglielmo Grechi ◽  
Matteo Fiorucci ◽  
Gian Marco Marmoni ◽  
Salvatore Martino

The study of strain effects in thermally-forced rock masses has gathered growing interest from engineering geology researchers in the last decade. In this framework, digital photogrammetry and infrared thermography have become two of the most exploited remote surveying techniques in engineering geology applications because they can provide useful information concerning geomechanical and thermal conditions of these complex natural systems where the mechanical role of joints cannot be neglected. In this paper, a methodology is proposed for generating point clouds of rock masses prone to failure, combining the high geometric accuracy of RGB optical images and the thermal information derived by infrared thermography surveys. Multiple 3D thermal point clouds and a high-resolution RGB point cloud were separately generated and co-registered by acquiring thermograms at different times of the day and in different seasons using commercial software for Structure from Motion and point cloud analysis. Temperature attributes of thermal point clouds were merged with the reference high-resolution optical point cloud to obtain a composite 3D model storing accurate geometric information and multitemporal surface temperature distributions. The quality of merged point clouds was evaluated by comparing temperature distributions derived by 2D thermograms and 3D thermal models, with a view to estimating their accuracy in describing surface thermal fields. Moreover, a preliminary attempt was made to test the feasibility of this approach in investigating the thermal behavior of complex natural systems such as jointed rock masses by analyzing the spatial distribution and temporal evolution of surface temperature ranges under different climatic conditions. The obtained results show that despite the low resolution of the IR sensor, the geometric accuracy and the correspondence between 2D and 3D temperature measurements are high enough to consider 3D thermal point clouds suitable to describe surface temperature distributions and adequate for monitoring purposes of jointed rock mass.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 2195
Author(s):  
Shiming Li ◽  
Xuming Ge ◽  
Shengfu Li ◽  
Bo Xu ◽  
Zhendong Wang

Today, mobile laser scanning and oblique photogrammetry are two standard urban remote sensing acquisition methods, and the cross-source point-cloud data obtained using these methods have significant differences and complementarity. Accurate co-registration can make up for the limitations of a single data source, but many existing registration methods face critical challenges. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a systematic incremental registration method that can successfully register MLS and photogrammetric point clouds in the presence of a large number of missing data, large variations in point density, and scale differences. The robustness of this method is due to its elimination of noise in the extracted linear features and its 2D incremental registration strategy. There are three main contributions of our work: (1) the development of an end-to-end automatic cross-source point-cloud registration method; (2) a way to effectively extract the linear feature and restore the scale; and (3) an incremental registration strategy that simplifies the complex registration process. The experimental results show that this method can successfully achieve cross-source data registration, while other methods have difficulty obtaining satisfactory registration results efficiently. Moreover, this method can be extended to more point-cloud sources.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 1304
Author(s):  
Wenchao Wu ◽  
Yongguang Hu ◽  
Yongzong Lu

Plant leaf 3D architecture changes during growth and shows sensitive response to environmental stresses. In recent years, acquisition and segmentation methods of leaf point cloud developed rapidly, but 3D modelling leaf point clouds has not gained much attention. In this study, a parametric surface modelling method was proposed for accurately fitting tea leaf point cloud. Firstly, principal component analysis was utilized to adjust posture and position of the point cloud. Then, the point cloud was sliced into multiple sections, and some sections were selected to generate a point set to be fitted (PSF). Finally, the PSF was fitted into non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) surface. Two methods were developed to generate the ordered PSF and the unordered PSF, respectively. The PSF was firstly fitted as B-spline surface and then was transformed to NURBS form by minimizing fitting error, which was solved by particle swarm optimization (PSO). The fitting error was specified as weighted sum of the root-mean-square error (RMSE) and the maximum value (MV) of Euclidean distances between fitted surface and a subset of the point cloud. The results showed that the proposed modelling method could be used even if the point cloud is largely simplified (RMSE < 1 mm, MV < 2 mm, without performing PSO). Future studies will model wider range of leaves as well as incomplete point cloud.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 2770
Author(s):  
Shengjing Tian ◽  
Xiuping Liu ◽  
Meng Liu ◽  
Yuhao Bian ◽  
Junbin Gao ◽  
...  

Object tracking from LiDAR point clouds, which are always incomplete, sparse, and unstructured, plays a crucial role in urban navigation. Some existing methods utilize a learned similarity network for locating the target, immensely limiting the advancements in tracking accuracy. In this study, we leveraged a powerful target discriminator and an accurate state estimator to robustly track target objects in challenging point cloud scenarios. Considering the complex nature of estimating the state, we extended the traditional Lucas and Kanade (LK) algorithm to 3D point cloud tracking. Specifically, we propose a state estimation subnetwork that aims to learn the incremental warp for updating the coarse target state. Moreover, to obtain a coarse state, we present a simple yet efficient discrimination subnetwork. It can project 3D shapes into a more discriminatory latent space by integrating the global feature into each point-wise feature. Experiments on KITTI and PandaSet datasets showed that compared with the most advanced of other methods, our proposed method can achieve significant improvements—in particular, up to 13.68% on KITTI.


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