Investigation of geometric performance of an indoor mobile mapping system

Abstract

Up-to-date and reliable 3D information of indoor environments is a prerequisite for many location-based services. One possibility to capture the necessary 3D data is to make use of Mobile Mapping Systems (MMSs) which rely for instance on SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping). In most indoor environments, MMSs are by far faster than classic static systems. Moreover, they might deliver the point clouds with higher degree of completeness. In this paper, the geometric quality of point clouds of a state-of-the-art MMS (Viametris iMS3D) is investigated. In order to quantify the quality of iMS3D MMS, four different evaluation strategies namely cloud to cloud, point to plane, target to target and model based evaluation are employed. We conclude that the measurement accuracies are better than 1 cm and the precision of the point clouds are better than 3 cm in our experiments. For indoor mapping applications with few centimeters accuracy, the system offers a very fast solution. Moreover, as a nature of the current SLAM-based approaches, trajectory loop should be closed, but in some practical situations, closing the local trajectory loop might not be always possible. Our observation reveals that performing continuous repeated scanning could decrease the destructive effect of local unclosed loops.