Noniterative Datum Transformation Revisited with Two-Dimensional Affine Model as a Case Study

Abstract

In geospatial applications, the datum transformation has been necessarily employed to transform the geospatial outcomes from the data-collection system to the user-interested system. Its key is to compute the transformation parameters that describe the geometric relation between two datum systems. The ordinary least-squares based transformation parameter estimation needs the iterative computations unless the initial values of parameters are approximate enough, which is usually time-consuming. Particularly with the development of (near) real-time data collection techniques, such iterative datum transformation method cannot meet the real-time applications. In this paper, we study the noniterative method in terms of the multivariate least-squares theory with two-dimensional empirical affine transformation as a case study. We address the noniterative transformation for the partially and fully error-affected affine models, respectively. The study indicates that the noniterative solution exists when the variance matrix of coordinate errors is structured as