Calibration Technology of Palmer Scanning Airborne Lidar with Vector Measurements

It is prerequisite to calibrate misalignment matrix between laser scanner and Position and Orientation System (POS) before airborne Light detection and ranging (Lidar) system being putted into survey application. A palmer scanning Lidar can present forward and backward scan intensity images of ground control areas. The pairs of biases between ground control points and central points of forward/backward scan areas are used to adjust the vector measurements of laser footprints. With a pair of non-collinear laser beam vectors and the corresponding footprint measurements of one single control area, the optimal q-method is adopted to solute the orthogonal rotation misaligning matrix. Hardware-in-loop simulation results show that algorithm satisfies the precision requirement of airborne Lidar calibration and performs robustly under various scenarios.