Impact of Terrain and Environment on the Accuracy of Vehicle-Based Mobile Mapping Systems

The rapid collection of accurate spatial data and its use in various domains is driving the development of Mobile Mapping Systems (MMS). This study evaluates the accuracy of the Riegl VMX-2HA system in three different environments: an urban residential area, an open road section with an unobstructed view of the sky, and a forested roadway where GNSS signals are significantly affected. This research investigates the effect of these environments and different alignment methods on point cloud accuracy. A combination of GNSS, IMU and DMI was used to determine the trajectory, with measurements tied to GCPs. The study compares the results of the processing of the separate sections with the calculation of the entire section and evaluates the differences of the repeated measurements. The results show that aligning measurements without separating sections by environment improves accuracy. The results contribute to the optimisation of MMS-based data collection strategies and provide insight to improve the reliability of spatial data collection.