Georeferencing of indoor omni-directional images acquired by a rotating line camera

To utilize omni-directional images acquired by a rotating line camera for indoor spatial information services, we should register precisely the images with respect to an indoor coordinate system. In this study, we thus develop a georef erencing method to estimate the exterior orientation parameters of an omni-directional image - the position and attitude of the camera at the acquisition time. First, we derive the collinearity equations for the omni-directional image by geometrically modeling the rotating line camera. We then estimate the exterior orientation parameters using the collinearity equations with indoor control points. The experimental results from the application to real data indicate that the exterior orientation parameters is estimated with the precision of 1.4 mm and 0.05° for the position and attitude, respectively. The residuals are within 3 and 10 pixels in horizontal and vertical directions, respectively. Particularly, the residuals in the vertical direction retain systematic errors mainly due to the lens distortion, which should be eliminated through a camera calibration process. Using omni-directional images georeferenced precisely with the proposed method, we can generate high resolution indoor 3D models and sophisticated augmented reality services based on the models.