Automatic detection of a one dimensional ranging pole for robust external camera calibration in mobile mapping

A mobile mapping system (MMS) is the answer of the geoinformation community to the exponentially growing demand for various geospatial data with increasingly higher accuracies, captured by multiple sensors. As the mobile mapping technology is pushed to explore its use for various applications on water, rail, or road, the need emerges to have an external sensor calibration procedure that is portable, fast and easy to perform. This way, sensors can be mounted and demounted depending on the application requirements without the need for time consuming calibration procedures. A new methodology is presented to provide a high quality external calibration of cameras which is automatic, robust and fool proof. The method uses a portable, standard ranging pole which needs to be positioned on a known ground control point. While the literature focuses on solving the absolute orientation problem of the calibration, an automatic method to detect the calibration object is missing. Here, we present a mutual information based image registration technique for automatic sub-pixel localization of the ranging pole under realistic outdoor conditions. We include several robust error detection rules to allow the calibration to run without human intervention, giving as little outliers as possible, to ensure a correct calibration. Several tests are performed under various lighting and noise conditions which prove the methodology’s robustness.