Cameron Ellum

LAND-BASED INTEGRATED SYSTEMS FOR MAPPING AND GIS APPLICATIONS

Abstract An emerging solution to the problems faced in modern data collection campaigns is the integration of various navigation and remote sensing technologies together on a common land-based platform. These land-based Mobile Mapping Systems (MMS) are capable of providing fast, efficient, cost-effective, and complete data collection. Their development has been motivated by a desire to overcome the problems with alternative methods of spatial data collection. These alternative methods include point-wise GPS and traditional terrestrial surveying — which are ill suited for rapid or dense data collection — and aerial photogrammetric surveys — which do not provide complete coverage. Land-based MMS share none of these disadvantages, while still being capable of providing similar object space accuracies. This paper provides a brief history of land-based MMS, including a summary of nearly all systems developed up to now. It then details the development of the geo-referencing formulas used by MMS and shows how such formulas can be used to determine the accuracies of points measured by the system. The paper concludes with a closer examination of two land-based mobile mapping systems — one vanbased, the other person-based. Both systems demonstrate that MMS are able to achieve absolute object-space accuracies between 10–20 em.