An automatic method for registration of terrestrial laser scanning data using planar surfaces

Abstract:

In this work, an automatic method for registration of terrestrial laser scanning data using planar surfaces is presented. Firstly, planar surfaces are detected using the RANSAC algorithm and their normal vectors are adjusted by the Total Least Squares method. After, an automatic algorithm to establish correspondences using the normal vectors and geometric planar analysis is proposed. Finally, the transformation parameters are determined using a plane-to-plane based model. The proposed algorithm solves the transformation parameters without the initial estimates and it applies quaternions to describe spatial rotations, making it faster and better than conventional approaches. Experiment was conducted to verify the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed method. The obtained results showed that this approach is promising and can computed positions despite measure errors of a few centimeters

Keywords:
Pairwise registration of 3D point clouds; Terrestrial laser scanning; Quaternions; matching plane-to-plane