Line scanning cameras, which capture only a single line of pixels, have been
increasingly used in ground based mobile or robotic platforms. In applications
where it is advantageous to directly georeference the camera data to world
coordinates, an accurate estimate of the camera's 6D pose is required. This
paper focuses on the common case where a mobile platform is equipped with a
rigidly mounted line scanning camera, whose pose is unknown, and a navigation
system providing vehicle body pose estimates. We propose a novel method that
estimates the camera's pose relative to the navigation system. The approach
involves imaging and manually labelling a calibration pattern with distinctly
identifiable points, triangulating these points from camera and navigation
system data and reprojecting them in order to compute a likelihood, which is
maximised to estimate the 6D camera pose. Additionally, a Markov Chain Monte
Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is used to estimate the uncertainty of the offset.
Tested on two different platforms, the method was able to estimate the pose to
within 0.06 m / 1.05∘ and 0.18 m / 2.39∘. We also propose
several approaches to displaying and interpreting the 6D results in a human
readable way.Comment: Published in MDPI Sensors, 30 October 201