Impacts of stochastic models on real-time 3D UAV mapping

Abstract. In UAV mapping using direct geo-referencing, the formation of stochastic model generally takes into the account the different types of measurements required to estimate the 3D coordinates of the feature points. Such measurements include image tie point coordinate measurements, camera position measurements and camera orientation measurements. In the commonly used stochastic model, it is commonly assumed that all tie point measurements have the same variance. In fact, these assumptions are not always realistic and thus, can lead to biased 3D feature coordinates. Tie point measurements for different image feature objects may not have the same accuracy due to the facts that the geometric distribution of features, particularly their feature matching conditions are different. More importantly, the accuracies of the geo-referencing measurements should also be considered into the mapping process. In this paper, impacts of typical stochastic models on the UAV mapping are investigated. It has been demonstrated that the quality of the geo-referencing measurements plays a critical role in real-time UAV mapping scenarios.