Investigating Stability of a Parametric Model in Calibration of Terrestrial Laser Scanners

There exist a number of factors that affect the quality laser scanner. In other words, the accuracy of a terrestrial scanner is limited extensively by systematic errors and thus must be calibrated. Indeed, calibration is a prerequisite for obtaining 3D precise and reliable data from point clouds. Until now, several models have been proposed to improve the accuracy of laser scanner data, most of which include both physical empirical parameters which are produced by observing point residuals, As a result, these models are just usable solely for those observations. The authors of have previously developed a new general parametric model based on the internal structure of laser scanner which can be used for a variety of TLS instruments. Due to of the importance of stability of parameters in a model, stability of them and the correlation between them needs to be investigated precisely, a task which is addressed thoroughly in this paper through a number of practical experiments. The results show that this model with a relative stability can improve the accuracy of TLS data. Keywords:Terrestrial Laser scanner, Calibration, Point cloud, Parametric model.