Recovery of Systematic Biases in Laser Altimeters Using Natural Surfaces

Elements of accuracy of LIDAR systems and the corrections of systematic errors have received growing attention in recent years. The expected level of accuracy and the additional processing that is needed for making the raw data ready to use are affected directly by the systematic errors in the laser data. It is evident that calibration of the LIDAR system, both laboratory and in-flight, are mandatory to alleviate these deficiencies. This paper presents an error recovery model that is based on modeling the system errors and on defining adequate control information. The association of the observations and control information, and configurations that enhance the reliability of the recovered parameters, are also studied here in detail.