A Review of Mobile Mapping Systems: From Sensors to Applications

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive review of modern mobile mapping systems, covering sensor types, workflows, applications, and future research directions, highlighting technological advances and current challenges.

Contribution

It offers an extensive overview of MMS technologies, sensor combinations, processing workflows, and application areas, along with insights into benefits, challenges, and future research paths.

Findings

Hybrid sensors improve robustness and data quality.

Mobile mapping applications span urban planning, navigation, and GIS.

Recent MMS technologies are increasingly accessible and cost-effective.

Abstract

The evolution of mobile mapping systems (MMSs) has gained more attention in the past few decades. MMSs have been widely used to provide valuable assets in different applications. This has been facilitated by the wide availability of low-cost sensors, the advances in computational resources, the maturity of the mapping algorithms, and the need for accurate and on-demand geographic information system (GIS) data and digital maps. Many MMSs combine hybrid sensors to provide a more informative, robust, and stable solution by complementing each other. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of the modern MMSs by focusing on 1) the types of sensors and platforms, where we discuss their capabilities, limitations, and also provide a comprehensive overview of recent MMS technologies available in the market, 2) highlighting the general workflow to process any MMS data, 3) identifying the different use cases of mobile mapping technology by reviewing some of the common applications, and 4) presenting a discussion on the benefits, challenges, and share our views on the potential research directions.