  This paper presents a large-scale strip adjustment method for LiDAR mobile
mapping data, yielding highly precise maps. It uses several concepts to achieve
scalability. First, an efficient graph-based pre-segmentation is used, which
directly operates on LiDAR scan strip data, rather than on point clouds.
Second, observation equations are obtained from a dense matching, which is
formulated in terms of an estimation of a latent map. As a result of this
formulation, the number of observation equations is not quadratic, but rather
linear in the number of scan strips. Third, the dynamic Bayes network, which
results from all observation and condition equations, is partitioned into two
sub-networks. Consequently, the estimation matrices for all position and
orientation corrections are linear instead of quadratic in the number of
unknowns and can be solved very efficiently using an alternating least squares
approach. It is shown how this approach can be mapped to a standard key/value
MapReduce implementation, where each of the processing nodes operates
independently on small chunks of data, leading to essentially linear
scalability. Results are demonstrated for a dataset of one billion measured
LiDAR points and 278,000 unknowns, leading to maps with a precision of a few
millimeters.
