Airborne light detecting and ranging (LiDAR) systems
have been widely used for the fast acquisition of dense
topographic data. Regrettably, coordinate errors always exist in
LiDAR-acquired points. The errors are attributable to several
sources, such as laser ranging errors, sensor mounting errors,
and position and orientation system (POS) systematic errors,
among others. LiDAR strip adjustment (LSA) is the solution to
eliminating the errors, but most state-of-the-art LSA methods
neglect the influence from POS systematic errors by assuming that
the POS is precise enough. Unfortunately, many of the LiDAR
systems used in China are equipped with a low-precision POS
due to cost considerations. Subsequently, POS systematic errors
should be also considered in the LSA. This paper presents an
aerotriangulation-aided LSA (AT-aided LSA) method whose major
task is eliminating position and angular errors of the laser
scanner caused by boresight angular errors and POS systematic
errors. The aerial images, which cover the same area with LiDAR
strips, are aerotriangulated and serve as the reference data for
LSA. Two types of conjugate features are adopted as control
elements (i.e., the conjugate points matched between the LiDAR
intensity images and the aerial images and the conjugate corner
features matched between LiDAR point clouds and aerial images).
Experiments using the AT-aided LSA method are conducted using
a real data set, and a comparison with the three-dimensional similarity
transformation (TDST) LSA method is also performed. Experimental
results support the feasibility of the proposed AT-aided
LSA method and its superiority over the TDST LSA method