Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS) Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) containing a three-orthogonal gyroscope and three-orthogonal accelerometer has been widely utilized in position and navigation, due to gradually improved accuracy and its small size and low cost. However, the errors of a MEMS IMU based standalone Inertial Navigation System (INS) will diverge over time dramatically, since there are various and nonlinear errors contained in the MEMS IMU measurements. Therefore, MEMS INS is usually integrated with a Global Positioning System (GPS) for providing reliable navigation solutions. The GPS receiver is able to generate stable and precise position and time information in open sky environment. However, under signal challenging conditions, for instance dense forests, city canyons, or mountain valleys, if the GPS signal is weak and even is blocked, the GPS receiver will fail to output reliable positioning information, and the integration system will fade to an INS standalone system. A number of effects have been devoted to improving the accuracy of INS, and de-nosing or modelling the random errors contained in the MEMS IMU have been demonstrated to be an effective way of improving MEMS INS performance. In this paper, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) method was proposed to de-noise the MEMS IMU output signals, specifically, a popular variant of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) RNN was employed to filter the MEMS gyroscope outputs, in which the signals were treated as time series. A MEMS IMU (MSI3200, manufactured by MT Microsystems Company, Shijiazhuang, China) was employed to test the proposed method, a 2 min raw gyroscope data with 400 Hz sampling rate was collected and employed in this testing. The results show that the standard deviation (STD) of the gyroscope data decreased by 60.3%, 37%, and 44.6% respectively compared with raw signals, and on the other way, the three-axis attitude errors decreased by 15.8%, 18.3% and 51.3% individually. Further, compared with an Auto Regressive and Moving Average (ARMA) model with fixed parameters, the STD of the three-axis gyroscope outputs decreased by 42.4%, 21.4% and 21.4%, and the attitude errors decreased by 47.6%, 42.3% and 52.0%. The results indicated that the de-noising scheme was effective for improving MEMS INS accuracy, and the proposed LSTM-RNN method was more preferable in this application.

The growing interest and the market for indoor Location Based Service (LBS) have been drivers for a huge demand for building data and reconstructing and updating of indoor maps in recent years. The traditional static surveying and mapping methods can’t meet the requirements for accuracy, efficiency and productivity in a complicated indoor environment. Utilizing a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)-based mapping system with ranging and/or camera sensors providing point cloud data for the maps is an auspicious alternative to solve such challenges. There are various kinds of implementations with different sensors, for instance LiDAR, depth cameras, event cameras, etc. Due to the different budgets, the hardware investments and the accuracy requirements of indoor maps are diverse. However, limited studies on evaluation of these mapping systems are available to offer a guideline of appropriate hardware selection. In this paper we try to characterize them and provide some extensive references for SLAM or mapping system selection for different applications. Two different indoor scenes (a L shaped corridor and an open style library) were selected to review and compare three different mapping systems, namely: (1) a commercial Matterport system equipped with depth cameras; (2) SLAMMER: a high accuracy small footprint LiDAR with a fusion of hector-slam and graph-slam approaches; and (3) NAVIS: a low-cost large footprint LiDAR with Improved Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE) algorithm developed by the Finnish Geospatial Research Institute (FGI). Firstly, an L shaped corridor (2nd floor of FGI) with approximately 80 m length was selected as the testing field for Matterport testing. Due to the lack of quantitative evaluation of Matterport indoor mapping performance, we attempted to characterize the pros and cons of the system by carrying out six field tests with different settings. The results showed that the mapping trajectory would influence the final mapping results and therefore, there was optimal Matterport configuration for better indoor mapping results. Secondly, a medium-size indoor environment (the FGI open library) was selected for evaluation of the mapping accuracy of these three indoor mapping technologies: SLAMMER, NAVIS and Matterport. Indoor referenced maps were collected with a small footprint Terrestrial Laser Scanner (TLS) and using spherical registration targets. The 2D indoor maps generated by these three mapping technologies were assessed by comparing them with the reference 2D map for accuracy evaluation; two feature selection methods were also utilized for the evaluation: interactive selection and minimum bounding rectangles (MBRs) selection. The mapping RMS errors of SLAMMER, NAVIS and Matterport were 2.0 cm, 3.9 cm and 4.4 cm, respectively, for the interactively selected features, and the corresponding values using MBR features were 1.7 cm, 3.2 cm and 4.7 cm. The corresponding detection rates for the feature points were 100%, 98.9%, 92.3% for the interactive selected features and 100%, 97.3% and 94.7% for the automated processing. The results indicated that the accuracy of all the evaluated systems could generate indoor map at centimeter-level, but also variation of the density and quality of collected point clouds determined the applicability of a system into a specific LBS.

Microelectromechanical System (MEMS) Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) is popular in the community for constructing a navigation system, due to its small size and low power consumption. However, limited by the manufacturing technology, MEMS IMU experiences more complicated noises and errors. Thus, noise modeling and suppression is important for improving accuracy of the navigation system based on MEMS IMU. Motivated by this problem, in this paper, a deep learning method was introduced to MEMS gyroscope de-noising. Specifically, a recently popular Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) variant Simple Recurrent Unit (SRU-RNN) was employed in MEMS gyroscope raw signals de-noising. A MEMS IMU MSI3200 from MT Microsystem Company was employed in the experiments for evaluating the proposed method. Following two problems were furtherly discussed and investigated: (1) the employed SRU with different training data length were compared to explore whether there was trade-off between the training data length and prediction performance; (2) Allan Variance was the most popular MEMS gyroscope analyzing method, and five basic parameters were employed to describe the performance of different grade MEMS gyroscope; among them, quantization noise, angle random walk, and bias instability were the major factors influencing the MEMS gyroscope accuracy, the compensation results of the three parameters for gyroscope were presented and compared. The results supported the following conclusions: (1) considering the computation brought from training dataset, the values of 500, 3000, and 3000 were individually sufficient for the three-axis gyroscopes to obtain a reliable and stable prediction performance; (2) among the parameters, the quantization noise, angle random walk, and bias instability performed 0.6%, 6.8%, and 12.5% improvement for X-axis gyroscope, 60.5%, 17.3%, and 34.1% improvement for Y-axis gyroscope, 11.3%, 22.7%, and 35.7% improvement for Z-axis gyroscope, and the corresponding attitude errors decreased by 19.2%, 82.1%, and 69.4%. The results surely demonstrated the effectiveness of the employed SRU in this application.

Non-contact and active vegetation or plant parameters extraction using hyperspectral information is a prospective research direction among the remote sensing community. Hyperspectral LiDAR (HSL) is an instrument capable of acquiring spectral and spatial information actively, which could mitigate the environmental illumination influence on the spectral information collection. However, HSL usually has limited spectral resolution and coverage, which is vital for vegetation parameter extraction. In this paper, to broaden the HSL spectral range and increase the spectral resolution, an Acousto-optical Tunable Filter based Hyperspectral LiDAR (AOTF-HSL) with 10 nm spectral resolution, consecutively covering from 500–1000 nm, was designed. The AOTF-HSL was employed and evaluated for vegetation parameters extraction. “Red Edge” parameters of four different plants with green and yellow leaves were extracted in the lab experiments for evaluating the HSL vegetation parameter extraction capacity. The experiments were composed of two parts. Firstly, the first-order derivative of the spectral reflectance was employed to extract the “Red Edge” position (REP), “Red Edge” slope (RES) and “Red Edge” area (REA) of these green and yellow leaves. The results were compared with the referenced value from a standard SVC^© HR-1024 spectrometer for validation. Green leaf parameter differences between HSL and SVC results were minor, which supported that notion the HSL was practical for extracting the employed parameter as an active method. Secondly, another two different REP extraction methods, Linear Four-point Interpolation technology (LFPIT) and Linear Extrapolation technology (LET), were utilized for further evaluation of using the AOTF-HSL spectral profile to determine the REP value. The differences between the plant green leaves’ REP results extracted using the three methods were all below 10%, and the some of them were below 1%, which further demonstrated that the spectral data collected from HSL with this spectral range and resolution settings was applicable for “Red Edge” parameters extraction.

The new spaceborne photon-counting lidar, i.e., ICESat-2, has shown great advantages in obtaining nearshore bathymetry at a global scale. The forward-scattering effect in the water column is one of the main error sources in airborne lidar bathymetry (ALB). However, the magnitude of the bathymetric bias for spaceborne lidars and how can we effectively correct this bias have not been evaluated and are very worthy of investigation. In this study, the forward-scattering effect on spaceborne photon-counting lidar bathymetry is quantitatively modeled and analyzed based on the semi-analytic Monte Carlo simulation method. Meanwhile, an empirical formula for correcting forward-scattering-induced bathymetric bias specific to ICESat-2 is derived. When the water depth exceeds 20 m, this bias cannot be neglected for ICESat-2 even in clear open ocean waters. In two study areas with local in situ measurements (St. Thomas and Hawaii), the bathymetric bias of ICESat-2 in deep waters (>20 m) is corrected from exceeding 50 cm to less than 13 cm using the proposed empirical formula. This study is valuable to evaluate and correct the forward-scattering-induced bias for the existing ICESat-2 and is also fundamental to optimizing the hardware parameters of a possible future photon-counting bathymetric lidar.

The far-field diffraction pattern (FFDP) of a corner cube retroreflector (CCR) determines the energy of a retroreflecting beam in some applications including laser ranging, optical communication, and satellite orbit calibration. The FFDP of an imperfect CCR is investigated analytically for the non-normal incidence of a polarized light beam. We first derive a complex amplitude of a retroreflecting beam in relation with multiple parameters including the errors of dihedral angle, flatness in a CCR, and polarization property of the CCR. Then a theoretical expression of the FFDP for a nonideal CCR is deduced as a function of multiple parameters by introducing the complex amplitude into a simplified Kirchhoff’s diffraction equation. Some numerically simulated results of the FFDP are presented to give a visual illustration of the relationship between the FFDP and these parameters. Our findings suggest that a strong correlation between the FFDPs and multiple factors comprising the manufacturing errors, the polarization states, and the incident angles of the input beam as well as whether the reflecting faces of the CCR are coated or not. The FFDPs can be efficiently controlled by allocating the magnitudes of these factors. Moreover, experimental verification of the FFDP is also developed for a nonideal CCR coated with silver film on the reflecting faces at a non-normal incidence. The proposed mathematical model potentially offers beneficial ingredients towards optimizing design of a CCR by considering both the manufacturing errors and incident conditions of the input beam.