Calibration of digital camera integration accuracy for low-cost oblique aerial photogrammetry

This work describes a calibration process for inexpensive consumer cameras integrated into a low cost and compact aerial multi-view imager for remote sensing and photogrammetry. The main advantage of this design is to make the filming component lightweight and rapidly deployable, as well as reducing cost when compared with mainstream commercial oblique imagery. An in situ flight test was carried out in Guiyang. In that experiment, a meridian convergence-based approach was adopted to adjust preprocessing, the residue error and the captured images’ exterior orientation linear and angular parameters were calculated by means of the direct geo-referencing approach yielding a favorable outcome for exterior orientation linear parameters of the camera, around 0.2–0.3 m deviation from the actual measured results at 1000 m flight above ground level. The camera’s exterior orientation angular parameters φ, ω whose difference compared with the standard aerial aero triangulation approach reached a high accuracy level within the intended endurance of 0.005°. These results indicate that the compact implementation of the oblique aerial imager comprised of consumer level off-the-shelf digital cameras achieved competitive accuracy at a low cost and high versatility.