Airborne LiDAR strip adjustment based on LSM

An airborne LiDAR system is an integration of GPS, INS, and laser scanner. Because of errors of these instruments or sub-optimalities of the GPS/INS integration, points of neighbouring laser scanner strips will usually show vertical and horizontal discrepancies. Currently the more common way for the reducing or ultimately eliminating discrepancies found in strip overlap areas is strip adjustment. Based on Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 C++ platform, a data-driven method of seven parameters conformal transformation for airborne LiDAR strip adjustment is realized in our paper, the algorithm improved Robert (2004) least squares surface matching algorithm, by introducing the Gauss-Markoff model, Acquired the unbiased minimum variance estimation for the unknown parameters. Real data sets are used to validate the method. We study the matching precision of different reference surface from two strips, the need for using Gauss-Markoff model and the matching accuracy. Experimental results show that after correction the point clouds show much better alignment and the vertical matching error is less than 0.05m.