This paper presents a practical framework for the integration of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based photogrammetry and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) with application to open-pit mine areas, which includes UAV image and TLS point cloud acquisition, image and cloud point processing and integration, object-oriented classification and three-dimensional (3D) mapping and monitoring of open-pit mine areas. The proposed framework was tested in three open-pit mine areas in southwestern China. (1) With respect to extracting the conjugate points of the stereo pair of UAV images and those points between TLS point clouds and UAV images, some feature points were first extracted by the scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) operator and the outliers were identified and therefore eliminated by the RANdom SAmple Consensus (RANSAC) approach; (2) With respect to improving the accuracy of geo-positioning based on UAV imagery, the ground control points (GCPs) surveyed from global positioning systems (GPS) and the feature points extracted from TLS were integrated in the bundle adjustment, and three scenarios were designed and compared; (3) With respect to monitoring and mapping the mine areas for land reclamation, an object-based image analysis approach was used for the classification of the accuracy improved UAV ortho-image. The experimental results show that by introduction of TLS derived point clouds as GCPs, the accuracy of geo-positioning based on UAV imagery can be improved. At the same time, the accuracy of geo-positioning based on GCPs form the TLS derived point clouds is close to that based on GCPs from the GPS survey. The results also show that the TLS derived point clouds can be used as GCPs in areas such as in mountainous or high-risk environments where it is difficult to conduct a GPS survey. The proposed framework achieved a decimeter-level accuracy for the generated digital surface model (DSM) and digital orthophoto map (DOM), and an overall accuracy of 90.67% for classification of the land covers in the open-pit mine.

Attitude jitter is a common phenomenon in the application of high resolution satellites, which may result in large errors of geo-positioning and mapping accuracy. Therefore, it is critical to detect and compensate attitude jitter to explore the full geometric potential of high resolution satellites. In this paper, a framework of jitter detection and compensation for high resolution satellites is proposed and some preliminary investigation is performed. Three methods for jitter detection are presented as follows. (1) The first one is based on multispectral images using parallax between two different bands in the image; (2) The second is based on stereo images using rational polynomial coefficients (RPCs); (3) The third is based on panchromatic images employing orthorectification processing. Based on the calculated parallax maps, the frequency and amplitude of the detected jitter are obtained. Subsequently, two approaches for jitter compensation are conducted. (1) The first one is to conduct the compensation on image, which uses the derived parallax observations for resampling; (2) The second is to conduct the compensation on attitude data, which treats the influence of jitter on attitude as correction of charge-coupled device (CCD) viewing angles. Experiments with images from several satellites, such as ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiaometer), LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) and ZY-3 (ZiYuan-3) demonstrate the promising performance and feasibility of the proposed framework.

This paper presents an improved weighted total least squares (IWTLS) method for the errors-in-variables (EIV) model with applications in linear fitting and coordinate transformation. In addition, an improved constrained weighted TLS (ICWTLS) method is further obtained based on the IWTLS algorithm. Following the weighted TLS solution (WTLSS) method in which the precisions of any two columns of the design matrix differ only by a scalar factor in linear orthogonal regression problems, the IWTLS method is derived for a more generic case in which there is no proportionality assumption for the cofactor matrix of the design matrix in the EIV model. Compared with existing research on the constrained TLS method under the assumption that both the constraining matrix and the right-hand-side (RHS) vector are error-free, or that only the RHS vector contains errors, the ICWTLS method is proposed for resolving the EIV model with constraints by integrating the observation equations and constraint equations under the assu...

This paper presents a partial total-least-squares adjustment method for condition equations (PTLSC) in which the observation vector and coefficient matrix contain linearly correlated errors. In the proposed method, the functionally independent variables in the observation vector and the coefficient matrix of the condition equations are abstracted to form a collected observation vector. The PTLSC method is formulated by minimizing the sum of the weighted squared errors of the collected observation vector by the use of a Lagrangian multiplier algorithm. The estimation of the covariance matrix based on linear approximation for the collected observation vector is also derived. The proposed PTLSC method was tested in an example of rectangular building adjustment in a geographical information system (GIS). The results indicate that the proposed PTLSC method can adjust the interior angles of the digitized buildings so they are right angles, and it can be used to maintain the correlations among the elements in the observation vector and the coefficient matrix.

The inflight stability of the earth observation satellite is a significant factor having an influence on the geometric performance of its imagery. The estimation of the attitude perturbance is therefore indispensable to spaceborne photogrammetry application. In this paper, an experiment using a short strip of multispectral images obtained from ZY-3 satellite is conducted. The detection method for attitude perturbance based on parallax observation is adopted, while a novel approach of estimating the attitude perturbance angles from the perturbance caused image displacements is also proposed and demonstrated. The estimated results indicate that the ZY-3 satellite was affected by considerable perturbances with distinctive frequencies during the flight of the investigated images, and attitude perturbances hava also undermined the geometric performance of the acquired imagery.