Simultaneous orientation of brightness, range and intensity images

Within the scope of a common evaluation of brightness, range and intensity images, this article introduces a new area based approach to achieve the simultaneous orientation of multiple data types. The actual innovation is the combined least-squares adjustment, which is an extension of object space image matching with ranges and intensities as additional observations. The complete mathematical model is specified and discussed. For a representation of complex object surfaces, the simultaneous consideration of multiple surface patches is described. The principle of this approach is shown with a synthetic data sample and evaluated with a real data set of a hybrid terrestrial laser scanner. In the experiments it is demonstrated, that in cases where the orientation of single sensors fails, the simultaneous orientation of hybrid sensors is still successful. Additionally, it is shown that the simultaneous surface reconstruction improves the orientation results and that brightness images can be oriented relative to laser scanner data including range and intensity images.