Adjustment of exterior orientation parameters for geometric registration of aerial images and LIDAR data

This research aims to develop a registration method to remove the geometric inconsistency between aerial images and LIDAR data acquired from an airborne multi-sensor system. The proposed method mainly includes registration primitives extraction, correspondence establishment, and EOP(Exterior Orientation Parameters) adjustment. As the registration primitives, we extracts planar patches and intersection edges from the LIDAR data and object points and linking edges from the aerial images. The extracted primitives are then categorized into horizontal and vertical ones; and their correspondences are established. These correspondent pairs are incorporated as stochastic constraints into the bundle block adjustment, which finally precisely adjusts the exterior orientation parameters of the images. According to the experimental results from the application of the proposed method to real data, we found that the attitude parameters of EOPs were meaningfully adjusted and the geometric inconsistency of the primitives used for the adjustment is reduced from 2 m to 2 cm before and after the registration. Hence, the results of this research can contribute to data fusion for the high quality 3D spatial information.