Abstract
Over the last 2 years, the Geomatics Research Group at the Politecnico di Torino has developed a low cost mobile mapping system, in which only low cost sensors are involved. The system is equipped with webcams, up to three MEMS IMU and up to four GNSS receivers. During this development, several (non negligible) problems have been solved in order to obtain good quality after the data processing. One of the main problems of the low cost systems concerns the occurrence of GNSS outages. In this case, the IMU can only estimate the trajectory and the attitude of the vehicle for short periods. For this reason, considering the high number of frames available (about 5–10 frames per second, fps), a vision-based navigation (VBN) approach, called GIMPHI (GNSS IMU and PHotogrammetry Integration), has been realized and tested. Using a novel auto-adaptive scale-invariant feature transform (A²SIFT) algorithm, tie points are extracted from sequences of images acquired according to unconventional geometric configuration (large affine transformation and rotations) andzz with large bad-textured areas. The GNSS/IMU navigation solutions have been refined by means of integration with a photogrammetric approach (bundle block adjustment) and a rigorous weight matrix has been adopted in order to consider the different accuracies of the various sensor observations (GNSS, IMU and images). A detailed description of this integrated approach is presented in this paper. The first tests and the achieved results are then shown in order to evaluate the reliability of the proposed approach.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank professors Horea Bendea and Ambrogio M. Manzino for their guidance and valuable advice about this study.
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De Agostino, M., Lingua, A., Marenchino, D. et al. GIMPHI: a new integration approach for early impact assessment. Appl Geomat 3, 241–249 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12518-011-0069-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12518-011-0069-6