On a Novel 360° Panoramic Stereo Mobile Mapping System

Image-based mobile mapping systems enable the efficient acquisition of georeferenced image sequences, which can later be exploited in cloud-based 3D geoinformation services. In order to provide a 360° coverage with accurate 3D measuring capabilities, we present a novel 360° panoramic stereo camera configuration. By using two 360° panorama cameras tilted forward and backward in combination with conventional forward and backward looking stereo camera sytems, we achieve a full 360° multi-stereo coverage. We furthermore developed a new mobile mapping system based on our proposed approach, which is operational and fulfills our high accuracy requirements. We successfully implemented a rigorous sensor and system calibration procedure, which allows calibrating all stereo systems with a superior accuracy compared to that of previous work. Our study delivered absolute 3D point accuracies in the range of 2 to 8 cm and relative accuracies of 3D distances in the range of 1 to 5 cm. We achieved these results in a challenging urban area. Furthermore, we automatically reconstructed a 3D city model of our study area by employing all captured and georeferenced mobile mapping imagery. The result is a highly detailed and almost complete 3D city model of the street-level environment.