A Comparative Analysis between Rigorous and Approximate Approaches for LiDAR System Calibration

LiDAR systems provide dense and accurate topographic information. A pre-requisite to achieving the potential accuracy of LiDAR is having a proper system calibration, which aims at estimating all the systematic errors in the system measurements and the mounting parameters relating the different components. This paper presents a rigorous and two approximate methods for LiDAR system calibration. The rigorous approach makes use of the LiDAR equation and the system raw measurements. The approximate approaches utilize simplified LiDAR equations using some assumptions, which allow for less strict requirements regarding the raw measurements. The first presented approximate method, denoted as quasi-rigorous, assumes that we are dealing with a vertical platform (i.e., small pitch and roll angles). This method requires time-tagged point cloud and trajectory position data. The second approximate method, denoted as simplified, assumes that we are dealing with parallel strips, vertical platform, and minor terrain elevation variations compared to the flying height above ground. Such method can be performed using the LiDAR point cloud only. Experimental results using a real dataset, whose characteristics deviate to some extent from the utilized assumptions in the approximate methods, are presented to provide a comparative analysis of the outcome from the introduced methods.