A Novel Approach to Terrestrial Lidar Georeferencing

Abstract This paper describes a novel method for determining theabsolute orientation of lidar point clouds using GPS measure-ments from two antennas firmly mounted on the opticalhead of a lidar scanner. The solution is linear and isderived from the non-linear georeferencing model by exploit-ing the properties of the skew-symmetric matrix. Simulationand real world experimentation using our prototype suggesta precision of about 0.05° ( 1 mrad) for the three Eulerattitude angles. The method can help alleviate problemsassociated with the conventional technique and can allowfor an increased number of practical applications forgeoreferenced terrestrial lidar. Introduction The current conventional methods for georeferencingterrestrial lidar point clouds utilize reflective targets withknown coordinates. Typically, a coordinate transformationfrom the scanner’s own coordinate system ( SOCS ) to mappingor global coordinate system ( GLCS ) can be solved using aminimum of three scanned points with known