Three-dimensional positional accuracy analysis of uav imagery using ground control points acquired from multisource geospatial data

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platform is being widely used in disaster monitoring and smart city, having the advantage of being able to quickly acquire images in small areas at a low cost. Ground Control Points (GCPs) for positioning UAV images are essential to acquire cm-level accuracy when producing UAV-based orthoimages and Digital Surface Model (DSM). However, the on-site acquisition of GCPs takes considerable manpower and time. This research aims to provide an efficient and accurate way to replace the on-site GNSS surveying with three different sources of geospatial data. The three geospatial data used in this study is as follows; 1) 25 cm aerial orthoimages, and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) based on 1:1000 digital topographic map, 2) point cloud data acquired by Mobile Mapping System (MMS), and 3) hybrid point cloud data created by merging MMS data with UAV data. For each dataset a three-dimensional positional accuracy analysis of UAV-based orthoimage and DSM was performed by comparing differences in three-dimensional coordinates of independent check point obtained with those of the RTK-GNSS survey. The result shows the third case, in which MMS data and UAV data combined, to be the most accurate, showing an RMSE accuracy of 8.9 cm in horizontal and 24.5 cm in vertical, respectively. In addition, it has been shown that the distribution of geospatial GCPs has more sensitive on the vertical accuracy than on horizontal accuracy.