A fully automatic registration method for laser scanner data

At the present time there is a considerable amount of development interest in utilising laser scanner (LS) data for 3D reconstruction and modelling. LS technology produces point clouds of very high density in a very short time. When surveying an object of complex geometry, multiple LS scans are typically required to generate an occlusion-free 3D model. The principal task associated with building 3D models from laser scanner data in such cases is to transform the scan data from the sensor's local coordinate system into a uniform Cartesian reference datum. This paper presents a fully automatic registration procedure for 3D data whereby the transformation parameters of one of the 3D data sets with respect to a reference data set are determined by minimizing the sum of the squares of the coordinates different between the surfaces. The proposed method provides a simultaneous registration of arbitrary 3D surfaces, as well as statistical tools for the analysis of the quality of the registration results. Test results obtained with the proposed approach are presented to highlight their efficiency and accuracy.