3D COORDINATE TRANSFORMATION USING TOTAL LEAST SQUARES

Nowadays, there are efforts around the globe to coordinate all mapping activities using the earth-centred WGS 84. Therefore the need to transform Nigerian coordinates hitherto based on the Nigerian non-earth centred Minna Datum to the global WGS 84. This research presents a 3D coordinate transformation between the local Minna Datum and the global WGS 84 datum in Nigeria using total least squares. The Bursa-Wolf and Molodensky-Badekas similarity/conformal transformation models are used for the experiment. One hundred and ten points are selected, of which sixty points are used to compute the values of the unknown parameters while the remaining fifty points are used to compute the accuracy of the model. The experiment shows that total least squares yields better result than the least squares; and also that the Molodensky-Badekas model results are better than those of the Bursa-Wolf model.