Accuracy Assessment of Mobile Mapping System

The needs of 3-D data have been increasing for various applications like visualization, 3-D modeling, planning and management as well as entertainment. Mobile mapping has become a quick and practical means for acquiring necessary 3-D data for above-mentioned applications. A mobile mapping system mainly consists of two main components, viz. data acquisition devices and positioning devices. The data acquisition devices consist of CCD cameras or/and laser scanners. The positioning devices consist of GPS, INS, Odometer (shaft encoder) and some other referencing devices. The overall accuracy of mobile mapping system depends on the accuracy of positioning devices and their integrated output. Though, GPS is the main input device for the position information, the signal is not available for the computation of position all the times in urban area. The GPS satellites are normally obstructed by high-rise buildings. Thus it is very important to understand the accuracy of such a system in different environments and means to solve such problems. We have developed a mobile mapping system called VLMS (Vehicle-borne Laser Mapping System), which consists of CCD Cameras, Laser scanners, GPS, INS and Odometer. In this paper, we will present and discuss the accuracy of this system with data acquired in different environments (open area, urban area, tunnel, express way etc) by analyzing the data with respect to other existing digital data.