Developing an image based low-cost mobile mapping system for GIS data acquisition

Abstract

The aim of this study is to develop a low-cost mobile mapping system (MMS) with the integration of vehicle-based navigation data and stereo images acquired along vehicle paths. The system consists of a dual frequency GNSS board combined with a low-cost INS unit and two machine vision cameras that collect colour image data for road and roadside objects. The navigation data and the image acquisition are properly synchronized to associate position and attitude to each digital frame captured. In this way, upon pixel location of objects appearing on the video frames, their absolute geographical coordinates can be extracted by employing standard photogrammetric methods. Several calibration steps are implemented before survey operation: camera calibration, relative orientation between cameras and determination of rotation angles and offsets between vehicle and cameras reference frames. A software tool has been developed to facilitate and speed up the calibration procedures. Furthermore, easy object coordinate extraction is supported, either in auto mode, where the conjugate image coordinates are obtained in real time using image correlation techniques. Several surveying experiments were executed to certify and check the accuracy and efficiency of the system. From the achieved results, the developed system is efficient for collecting and positioning road spatial objects such as such as road boundaries, traffic lights, road signs, power poles, etc, more rapidly and less expensively. The obtained absolute positional accuracy is less than 1 meter, depending on the availability and quality of the GPS signal.