Mobile mapping system for high-resolution imaging

Mobile mapping vehicles are rapidly gaining in importance as they accelerate the digitization of road surroundings. This data is indispensable for municipalities as a quantification of the state of the art as well as for planning of infrastructure projects. Fast laser scanners for 3D point cloud generation and high-resolution cameras are becoming more readily available, increasing not only data quality but also the amount of acquired raw data. Thus, taking advantage of modern computing power and developing strategies for data handling is getting crucial. In this paper, a measurement vehicle is presented that handles up to 4 GB/s of raw data. The vehicle is based on a modular system platform from the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM. A Clearance Profile Scanner built by Fraunhofer IPM scans a 345° area almost perpendicular to the driving direction and delivers 3D data with 2 MHz sampling rate and millimeter precision. A high-end positioning solution provides the absolute location at any time. Two off-the-shelf panoramic cameras provide images for standard use cases. As a special feature, six 31 megapixels CMOS cameras acquire high-resolution image data from which a panoramic image can also be computed. A special network controller running custom software handles the large amount of network traffic. Additionally, a sophisticated on-board data processing pipeline was developed which performs image compression on a graphic card before the data is stored in permanent memory. Thus, all raw data can be managed and stored for driving speeds up to 144 km/h.