Featured-Based Registration of Terrestrial Laser Scans with Minimum Overlap Using Photogrammetric Data

Abstract

Currently, there is a considerable interest in 3D object reconstruction using terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) systems due to their ability to automatically generate a considerable amount of points in a very short time. To fully map an object, multiple scans are captured. The different scans need to be registered with the help of the point cloud in the overlap regions. To guarantee reliable registration, the scans should have large overlap ratio with good geometry for the estimation of the transformation parameters among these scans. The objective of this paper is to propose a registration method that relaxes/eliminates the overlap requirement through the utilization of photogrammetrically reconstructed features. More specifically, a point-based procedure, which utilizes nonconjugate points along corresponding linear features from photogrammetric and TLS data, will be used for the registration. The non-correspondence of the selected points along the linear features is compensated for by artificially modifying their weight matrices. The paper presents experimental results from simulated and real datasets to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed procedure.