Adjustment of Exterior Orientation of the Digital Aerial Images using LiDAR Points

LiDAR systems are usually incorporated a laser scanner and GPS/INS modules with a digital aerial camera. LiDAR point clouds and digital aerial images acquired by the systems provide complementary spatial information on the ground. In addition, some of laser scanners provide intensity, radiometric information on the surface of the earth. Since the intensity is unnecessary of registration and provides the radiometric information at a certain wavelength on the location of LiDAR point, it can be a valuable ancillary information but it does not deliver sufficient radiometric information compared with digital images. This study utilize the LiDAR points as ground control points (GCPs) to adjust exterior orientations(EOs) of the stereo images. It is difficult to find exact point of LiDAR corresponding to conjugate points in stereo images, but this study used intensity of LiDAR as an ancillary data to find the GCPs. The LiDAR points were successfully used to adjust EOs of stereo aerial images, therefore, successfully provided the prerequisite for the precise registration of the two data sets from the LiDAR systems.