Point-based versus Plane-based Self-calibration of Static Terrestrial Laser Scanners

Systematic trends are apparent when studying the self-calibration residuals of many modern static terrestrial laser scanners. Since the operation of terrestrial laser scanners is comparable to an efficient robotic total station, the sensor modelling parameters are developed in the spherical coordinate system where the raw observables of the scanner are range, horizontal angle, and vertical angle. Sensor calibration parameters are already well established for both hybrid and panoramic type laser scanners through the signalized target-based self-calibration method. In this paper, a less labour-intensive and more efficient planar-feature based terrestrial laser scanner self-calibration method, which is more suitable for in-situ self-calibration, is presented. Through simulation it will be demonstrated that the point-based self-calibration and plane-based self-calibration shares many common characteristics. Plane-based self-calibration results from real data captured with the panoramic type Leica HDS6100 and hybrid type Trimble GS200 scanner are also presented to show the practicality of the proposed method and as a comparison to the point-based self-calibration. * Corresponding author.