Dynamic multi-sensor platform for efficient 3D-digitalization of cities: part II
Abstract The digitization of geographic environments, such as cities and archaeological sites, is of priority interest to the scientific community due to its potential applications. But there are still several issues to address. There are various digitization strategies, which include terrestrial/ airborne platforms and composed of various sensors, among the most common, cameras and laser scanners. A comprehensive methodology is presented to reconstruct urban environments using a mobile land platform. All the implemented stages are described, which includes the acquisition, processing, and correlation of the data delivered by a Velodyne HDL-64E scanner, a spherical camera, GPS, and inertial systems. The process to merge several point clouds to build a large-scale map is described, as well as the generation of surfaces. Being able to render large urban areas using a low density of points but without losing the details of the structures within the urban scenes. The proposal is evaluated using several metrics, for example, Coverage and Root-Mean-Square-Error (RSME). The results are compared against 3 methodologies reported in the literature. Obtaining better results in the 2D/3D data fusion process and the generation of surfaces. The described method has a low RMSE (0.79) compared to the other methods and a runtime of approximately 40 seconds to process each data set (point cloud, panoramic image, and inertial data). In general, the proposed methodology shows a more homogeneous density distribution without losing the details, that is, it conserves the spatial distribution of the points, but with fewer data.