Automatic calibration of 3D mobile laser scanning using aerial surveillance data for precise urban mapping

The precise map is the main provider of static environment information for the intelligent vehicles. Therefore, it is considered as a fundamental requirement for such systems. The accuracy of Mobile Mapping Systems (MMS), one of the main vehicle-based 3D laser scanning technologies, is significantly degraded due to the blockage of GPS signals in deep urban areas where tall buildings are surrounding streets. Existing solutions for the adjustment of the MMS data which require a manual measurement of the Ground Control Points (GCP) are labor-intensive and costly. In this paper, a fully-automatic framework for the calibration of the MMS is presented which corrects the 3D laser scanning data based on the road markings extracted from the aerial surveillance data. The proposed framework consists of three main steps: road marking extraction from aerial data, road marking extraction from the MMS point cloud, and the registration of the MMS road markings to the aerial reference. For the registration, a method based on the dynamic sliding window is introduced. The experimental results of the Hitotsubashi intersection in Tokyo demonstrate that the proposed method is practical for the MMS calibration in the urban area and it could achieve a pixel-level accuracy, where the Ground Sampling Distance (GSD) of the airborne image was 12cm.