The use of Personal Mobile Terrestrial
System (PMTS) has increased considerably for mobile mapping applications
because these systems offer dynamic data acquisition with ground
perspective in places where the use of wheeled platforms is unfeasible,
such as forests and indoor buildings. PMTS has become more popular with
emerging technologies, such as miniaturized navigation sensors and
off-the-shelf omnidirectional cameras, which enable low-cost mobile
mapping approaches. However, most of these sensors have not been
developed for high-accuracy metric purposes and therefore require
rigorous methods of data acquisition and data processing to obtain
satisfactory results for some mapping applications. To contribute to the
development of light, low-cost PMTS and potential applications of these
off-the-shelf sensors for forest mapping, this paper presents a
low-cost PMTS approach comprising an omnidirectional camera with
off-the-shelf navigation systems and its evaluation in a forest
environment. Experimental assessments showed that the integrated sensor
orientation approach using navigation data as the initial information
can increase the trajectory accuracy, especially in covered areas. The
point cloud generated with the PMTS data had accuracy consistent with
the Ground Sample Distance (GSD) range of omnidirectional images (3.5–7
cm). These results are consistent with those obtained for other PMTS
approaches.

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