Comparison of target-and mutual informaton based calibration of terrestrial laser scanner and digital camera for deformation monitoring

Abstract

In the current state-of-the-art, geodetic deformation analysis of natural and artificial objects (e.g. dams, bridges,.) is an ongoing research in both static and kinematic mode and has received considerable interest by researchers and geodetic engineers. In this work, due to increasing the accuracy of geodetic deformation analysis, a terrestrial laser scanner (TLS; here the Zoller+Fröhlich IMAGER 5006) and a high resolution digital camera (Nikon D750) are integrated to complementarily benefit from each other. In order to optimally combine the acquired data of the hybrid sensor system, a highly accurate estimation of the extrinsic calibration parameters between TLS and digital camera is a vital preliminary step. Thus, the calibration of the aforementioned hybrid sensor system can be separated into three single calibrations: calibration of the camera, calibration of the TLS and extrinsic calibration between TLS and digital camera. In this research, we focus on highly accurate estimating extrinsic parameters between fused sensors and target- and targetless (mutual information) based methods are applied. In target-based calibration, different types of observations (image coordinates, TLS measurements and laser tracker measurements for validation) are utilized and variance component estimation is applied to optimally assign adequate weights to the observations. Space resection bundle adjustment based on the collinearity equations is solved using Gauss-Markov and Gauss-Helmert model. Statistical tests are performed to discard outliers and large residuals in the adjustment procedure. At the end, the two aforementioned approaches are compared and advantages and disadvantages of them are investigated and numerical results are presented and discussed.