Improvement of photogrammetric accuracy by modeling and correcting the thermal effect on camera calibration

This paper presents a new method for improving the geometric accuracy of photogrammetric reconstruction by modeling and correcting the thermal effect on camera image sensor. The objective is to verify that when the temperature of image sensor varies during the acquisition, image deformation induced by the temperature change is quantifiable, modelisable and correctable. A temperature sensor integrated in the camera enables the measurement of image sensor temperature at exposure. It is therefore natural and appropriate to take this effect into account and to finally model and correct it after a calibration step. Nowadays, in cartography applications performed with UAV, the frame rate of acquisitions is continuously increasing. A high frame rate over a long acquisition time can result in an important temperature increase of the image sensor and thus introduces image deformations. The correction of the above-mentioned effect can improve the measurement accuracy. We present three methods to calibrate the thermal effect and experiments on two datasets are carried out to verify the improvement in terms of the photogrammetric accuracy.