A low cost mobile mapping system

In this work an alternative method, respect today’s tipical road survey, is presented. Tipically, a road survey is carried out by a team composed by three operators at least, that moves with a vehicle on which an odometer is mounted on the rear in order to measure the effective travelled road. Given this operational procedure, a road survey requires, as a rule, a lot of time, resulting therefore very laborious and expensive regarding the employement of economic and human resources. Possible solutions to these problems could be represented by integration of Computer Vision technology with modern satellite positioning system, as GPS. Also in agreement with this idea, GeoVision, a digital photogrammetric software for road survey, has been developed at the University of Padua (Italy). The system consists of a van equipped with two digital cameras, Sony XC75CE recording in continous way the surveyed environment and a GPS receiver that provides post-processed differential positions. From a pair of correspondent digital images, the 3D position of a feature can be determined in a global reference system (namely WGS-84), by integration of photogrammetric triangulation techniques and computer vision algoritms. In following sections the tools regarding digital image processing subsystem of GeoVision will be described in detail.