| Currently, there is an enormous number of Geomatics sensory data available for use in mapping applications. These data are collected from different platforms, using different sensors, and encapsulating different amount of information. The topic of multi-sensor data fusion has received, over the years, a lot of attention by the scientific community for many applications. Multi-sensor data fusion techniques combine data from multiple sensors and related information from associated databases, to achieve improved accuracies and more specific inferences than could be achieved by the use of a single sensor alone.Many researchers have proposed different fusion schemes for integrating different sensory data. This fusion process can be broadly classified into pictorial to pictorial, pictorial to non-pictorial, and non pictorial to non-pictorial. Yet, many researchers have investigated different fusion schemes, however there is less amount of attention towards the fusion of airborne and land-based mobile mapping systems' imagery/navigation data.This research introduces a novel data fusion scheme between mobile mapping data, collected from different platforms. The fusion includes both pictorial measurements, in addition to navigation data available from system's navigation component. The fusion is done using generic Bundle Adjustment (BA) engine, which is a generalization of the standard bundle adjustment frameworks. The proposed framework has been adapted to fit the special requirements imposed by the proposed fusion scheme like higher order registration primitives, multi-camera enabled, object space constraints, ECEF as a computational frame for bundle adjustment, and finally, involving variance component estimation as an optimal weighting strategy.Based on the proposed registration scheme, we bring up three innovative applications, which are oriented towards two different communities namely photogrammetry and navigation.Mobile mapping systems are efficient tools for collecting multi-sensor data that can be used to build and update geographic information systems base maps. The concept of mobile mapping became the mapping standard. Despite the first mobile mapping system was installed on a van, the application has no longer limited to vans. It is now installed on various types of platforms, running in land, sea, and air. |
