Calibration and synchronization of geospatial metadata for aerial sensor systems

Given an aerial imagery showing an interesting object one often asks for the exact location of the object in the world. There are several approaches to answer the question but one of the easiest and computational cheapest approach is to use geospatial metadata like from a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and inertial navigation system (INS) together with a digital elevation model (DEM) of the observed area to estimate the target location. The quality of the result depends greatly on the precision of the metadata and the accuracy of the synchronization of the metadata to the single imagery frame. This paper discusses how to quantitatively describe the accuracy of the metadata of an aerial motion imagery system. The aim is to have this information available for information fusion that improve the object location as presumed by the metadata with information from image recognition algorithms.