PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
December 2016
923
Special Issue Foreword
Charles Toth and Norbert Haala
MobileMapping startedwith the introductionof GPS anddigital
imaging about two decades ago. The motivation was to replace
time and labor-consuming field surveys along transportation
corridors with an efficient technology that could provide
rich geospatial data for the fledging GIS market’s needs. The
original idea was to acquire digital images along a corridor with
imaging sensor orientation obtained by direct georeferencing
(GPS/INS), and then process the data and imagery in the office.
The benefits included reduced field survey time, as the Mobile
Mapping vehicle traveled at a normal speed, significantly
reducing hazards to field crews, less traffic disruption, and the
ability to extract and position any object visible in the imagery,
including road centerlines, curb lines, traffic signs, light
poles, street furniture. Today, Mobile Mapping has become
ubiquitous, and high-performance imaging systems supported
by direct georeferencing are widely used on platforms from
space, airborne, and terrestrial applications. Clearly, multi-
platformandmulti-sensory integratedMobileMapping systems
have established themselves as the prime geospatial data
acquisition technology. The direct georeferencing component
of Mobile Mapping is an enabling technology, as it provides
the basis for using scanning image systems, and, in particular,
allows for active imaging, such as lidar and SAR.
The introduction of Mobile Mapping systems spurred strong
algorithmic research as well as software developments early on.
Soon a community was formed and created the biannual series
of International Symposiums on Mobile Mapping Systems; the
first one was held at The Ohio State University in 1995. The
9
th
International Symposium on Mobile Mapping Technology
(MMT2015) was held in Sydney, Australia, December 9-11,
2015. The Symposium welcomed over 300 attendees, more
than two thirds of them coming from 35 countries around
the globe, mostly representing academia. The program
included three keynote presentations, two panel discussions,
27 technical sessions, and pre-symposium workshops. The
Symposium Scientific Committee received about 270 abstract
and full paper submissions, from which about 160 papers
were accepted to the Symposium program, and subsequently
included in the Symposium Proceedings. The about 150 full
paper submissions were peer-reviewed to provide feedback to
the authors, and formed the basis to invite the selected papers
for submission to various peer-reviewed journals. Based on the
review process, 21 papers appeared to be of high quality and
suitable for submission to
PE&RS
, and 14 authors responded
to the invitation to develop their papers to submission for
the
PE&RS
Special Issue on Mobile Mapping Technology.
The rigorous review process resulted in the acceptance of six
papers published in this Special Issue.
The articles that make up this Special Issue cover most
of the currently relevant topics in Mobile Mapping and
fairly well represent the generic trends in Mobile Mapping
Technology, and to some extent, the tendencies in the entire
geospatial science and engineering field. The first paper,
titled
Image Based Mobile Mapping for 3D Urban Data
Capture
, by S. Cavegn and N. Haala, investigates the benefits
of using dense multi-view image matching to improve the
georeferencing performance as well as better support mapping
for the most typical image acquisition in Mobile Mapping. To
better support the sensor orientation of panoramic, full-view,
imagery, a specific implementation of the classical bundle
block adjustment has been proposed in
Bundle Adjustment of
Spherical Images Acquired with A Portable Panoramic Image
Mapping System
(
PPIMS
), by Y-H. Tseng, Y-C. Chen and K.
Ying Lin. UAS represents the most popular platform currently,
and while optical imagery is the dominant sensor on UAS,
lidar sensors are slowly introduced into production. The paper
titled,
Rigorous Strip Adjustment of UAV-based Laserscanning
Data Including Time-Dependent Correction of Trajectory
Errors
, by P. Glira, N. Pfeifer and G. Mandlburger, provides a
new strip adjustment technique by combining the laser sensor
calibration and georeferencing refinement processes. Point
clouds have been recently accepted as fundamental geospatial
data, next to optical imagery, as they can be easily and
accurately produced either directly by lidar and indirectly by
photogrammetrically, using dense image matching techniques.
The article titled,
Planar-Based Adaptive Down-Sampling of
Point Clouds
, by Y-J. Lin, R. Benziger, and A. Habib, introduces
a point cloud compressionmethod to reduce the size of the point
cloud while maintaining the spatial information. As driver-
assisted and autonomous vehicle navigation technologies are
advancing, the sensing of the vehicle environment, both a
priori and in real time Mobile Mapping, is becoming a crucial
task. The paper titled,
Generating a Hazard Map of Dynamic
Objects using Lidar Mobile Mapping
, by A. Schlichting and
C. Brenner, addresses the problem of producing hazard maps
with respect to pedestrians and cyclists. The lidar waveform
acquisition and processing have seen major developments
recently, including the waveform availability on terrestrial
platforms. The article titled,
Improved Urban Scene
Classification Using Full-Waveform Lidar
, by M. Azadbakht, C.
Fraser, and K. Khoshelham, provides a new approach to assess
the performance of waveform processing, aimed at urban
classification.
We would like to thank all the authors for their contributions
and the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote
Sensing for devoting this Special Issue to Mobile Mapping.
Guest Editors
Charles Toth, The Ohio State University
Norbert Haala, University of Stuttgart
Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing
Vol. 82, No. 12, December 2016, pp. 923–923.
0099-1112/16/923–923
© 2016 American Society for Photogrammetry
and Remote Sensing
doi: 10.14358/PERS.82.12.923
