Assessing Accuracy of Rover Data

Until someone provides a link for you, I think it is safe to say that the answer you seek lies in checking your work. This is what a surveyor does. He checks his work against things that have been previously determined and using standards that are provided to him by an authority.

Your check should be something that lies outside of the system you are using. If we let the processing software check itself, it is liable to become corrupt, just like … um, er … well, let’s not go there.

If you have no set of known points (GCPs) included in your aerial survey, then how could you think of claiming accuracy without some other means of determining it?

Let us stretch this question to the extreme. Say you flew 100 surveys, all with known points included. Some matched up and some didn’t. In analyzing the log files, you see a pattern forming. In the surveys that didn’t match up, you noticed some of these traits:

  1. number of satellites was below figure X
  2. average SNR was below figure Y
  3. DOP was below figure Z
  4. etc.
  5. etc.
  6. forgot to put SD card in survey camera
  7. etc.

Through your experience, you could say that in all cases where none of these negative elements were present, your surveys were correct (meeting a certain standard). So in this new survey which included zero known points, you will presume, based on experience, that because none of these negative elements are present, then you are confident that your survey is correct. (Until proof is shown that it is not)

This is not documentation, or even advice on how you should go about your business, but just one logical path to follow to allow you to reach your goal.

In the meantime, we wait for some good documentation or paper to show up on how to check/confirm/certify the accuracy of an aerial survey with no GCPs. :slight_smile:


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