GPS-aided method for platform attitude determination based on target images

Attitude measurement error is one of the main factors that deteriorates the imaging accuracy of laser scanning. In view of the fact that the inertial navigation system (INS) with high accuracy is very costly, a low-cost but effective GPS-aided method based on the target images is proposed to measure the platform attitude angles in this paper. Based on the relationship between the attitude change of the platform and the displacement of two adjacent images, the attitude change can be derived by the proposed method. To quantitatively evaluate the accuracy of the platform attitude angles measured by the proposed method, an outdoor experiment was carried out in comparison with the GPS/INS method. The preliminary results demonstrated that the measurement accuracy using the proposed method was better than 0.05° (RMSE).