Determination of the Interior Orientation Parameters of a Non-metric Digital Camera for Terrestrial Photogrammetric Applications

Abstract

High cost of metric photogrammetric cameras has given rise to the utilisation of non-metric digital cameras to generate photogrammetric products in traditional close range or terrestrial photogrammetric applications. For precision photogrammetric applications, the internal metric characteristics of the camera, customarily known as the Interior Orientation Parameters, need to be determined and analysed. The derivation of these parameters is usually achieved by implementing a bundle adjustment with self-calibration procedure. The stability of the Interior Orientation Parameters is an issue in terms of accuracy in digital cameras since they are not built with photogrammetric applications in mind. This study utilised two photogrammetric software (i.e. Photo Modeler and Australis) to calibrate a non-metric digital camera to determine its Interior Orientation Parameters. The camera parameters were obtained using the two software and the Root Mean Square Errors (RMSE) calculated. It was observed that Australis gave a RMSE of 0.2435 and Photo Modeler gave 0.2335, implying that, the calibrated non-metric digital camera is suitable for high precision terrestrial photogrammetric projects.