Temperature Compensation for Radiometric Correction of Terrestrial LiDAR Intensity Data

Correction of terrestrial Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) intensity data has been increasingly studied in recent years. The purpose is to obtain additional insight into the scanned environment that is not available from the geometric information alone. Radiometric correction, as the name implies, corrects the received intensity to standard reflectance values in the range of (0, 1). This correction typically compensates for the dependence of angle and distance. This paper presents an additional compensation for temperature that may be necessary for some LiDAR instruments such as the Faro Focus3D X 330 laser scanner. It is also shown that temperature compensation is not necessary for the Riegl VZ–400. Another important contribution of this work is the verification of a previously published radiometric correction in different environments. The correction was applied to two different Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) instruments: a Faro Focus3D X 330 and Riegl VZ-400. Overall, the VZ-400, without temperature compensation, produced better results with a Root Mean Square (RMS) of the standard deviation of error being 0.053 and a RMS of the mean error of 0.036 compared to 0.069 and 0.046 for the Faro Focus3D X 330. It was found, for the case of the Faro device, that the temperature of the instrument played an important role in the accuracy of the results. The proposed temperature compensation method improved the RMS standard deviation of the error by 1.4 times and the RMS of the error by 2.6 times, compared to the uncompensated results.