Terrestrial laser scanners self-calibration study: datum constraints analyses for network configurations

Abstract

Similar to other electronic instruments, terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) can also inherent with various systematic errors coming from different sources. Self-calibration technique is a method available to investigate these errors for TLS which were adopted from photogrammetry technique. According to the photogrammetry principle, the selection of datum constraints can cause different types of parameter correlations. However, the network configuration applied by TLS and photogrammetry calibrations are quite different, thus, this study has investigated the significant of photogrammetry datum constraints principle in TLS self-calibration. To ensure that the assessment is thorough, the datum constraints analyses were carried out using three variant network configurations: 1) minimum number of scan stations; 2) minimum number of surfaces for targets distribution; and 3) minimum number of point targets. Based on graphical and statistical, the analyses of datum constraints selection indicated that the parameter correlations obtained are significantly similar. In addition, the analysis has demonstrated that network configuration is a very crucial factor to reduce the correlation between the calculated parameters.