Autonomous Calibration of Moving Line Scanners with Coded Photogrammetric Target Recognition

Abstract

In this paper, we describe an automatic approach for a terrestrial line scanner calibration. The system is calibrated with prior knowledge of the exterior orientation of the camera in an unknown coordinate system. This data is acquired by tracking the moving sensor platform with an infrared camera tracking system (ARTtrack2) along a calibration scene. The calibration of a line scanner includes the determination of the transformation parameters to the known control point coordinate system (translation and rotation) and three parameters of the one-dimensional distortion model (simplified BROWN) for the sensor array. The focal length of the camera is assumed to be known. After a first rectification of the data with the tracking observations, photogrammetric targets are automatically detected and decoded. Finally, the distortion parameters of the camera and the transformation between world- and tracking coordinates are iteratively estimated.