Automated Accuracy Assessment of a Mobile Mapping System with Lightweight Laser Scanning and MEMS Sensors

The accuracy assessment of mobile mapping system (MMS) outputs is usually reliant on manual labor to inspect the quality of a vast amount of collected geospatial data. This paper presents an automated framework for the accuracy assessment and quality inspection of point cloud data collected by MMSs operating with lightweight laser scanners and consumer-grade microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) sensors. A new, large-scale test facility has been established in a challenging navigation environment (downtown area) to support the analyses conducted in this research work. MMS point cloud data are divided into short time slices for comparison with the higher-accuracy, terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) point cloud of the test facility. MMS data quality is quantified by the results of registering the point cloud of each slice with the TLS datasets. Experiments on multiple land vehicle MMS point cloud datasets using a lightweight laser scanner and three different MEMS devices are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The mean accuracy of a consumer grade MEMS (<$100) was found to be 1.13 +/- 0.47 m. The mean accuracy of two commercial MEMS (>$100) was in the range of 0.48 +/- 0.23 m to 0.85 +/- 0.52 m. The method presented here in can be straightforwardly implemented and adopted for the accuracy assessment of other MMSs types such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)s.