Analysis of positioning errors caused by platform vibration of airborne LiDAR system

Airborne Light Detection And Ranging system (LiDAR) has been becoming a conventional tool for geospatial data acquisition. The geo-referencing process, which transforms the primary laser echo signals to 3D geospatial data, suffers from various types of positioning errors. In this paper, we categorized error-causing factors into internal and external ones. Among all the factors, the impact caused by the instability of platform is simulated and analyzed for the first time in order to remove them as completely as possible. Beginning with the airborne LiDAR geo-location equation, errors caused by the platform vibration are introduced into the equation and then computer simulation is carried out to estimate its contributions to the bias of laser scanning angle? mounting angles between the coordinates of the laser scanner and the IMU system. The simulating results show that platform vibration degrades the accuracy of the point clouds acquired by a LiDAR, and that the errors caused by platform vibration can not be fitted by simple polynomial funcitions, thus deserves further research.