A study of projections for key point based registration of panoramic terrestrial 3D laser scan

This paper surveys state-of-the-art image features and descriptors for the task of 3D scan registration based on panoramic reflectance images. As modern terrestrial laser scanners digitize their environment in a spherical way, the sphere has to be projected to a two-dimensional image. To this end, we evaluate the equirectangular, the cylindrical, the Mercator, the rectilinear, the Pannini, the stereographic, and the z-axis projection. We show that the Mercator and the Pannini projection outperform the other projection methods.