ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
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Articles | Volume III-5
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-III-5-97-2016
https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-III-5-97-2016
06 Jun 2016
 | 06 Jun 2016

COARSE POINT CLOUD REGISTRATION BY EGI MATCHING OF VOXEL CLUSTERS

Jinhu Wang, Roderik Lindenbergh, Yueqian Shen, and Massimo Menenti

Keywords: Laser scanning, Point clouds, Voxels, Clustering, Eigenvalues, Registration

Abstract. Laser scanning samples the surface geometry of objects efficiently and records versatile information as point clouds. However, often more scans are required to fully cover a scene. Therefore, a registration step is required that transforms the different scans into a common coordinate system. The registration of point clouds is usually conducted in two steps, i.e. coarse registration followed by fine registration. In this study an automatic marker-free coarse registration method for pair-wise scans is presented. First the two input point clouds are re-sampled as voxels and dimensionality features of the voxels are determined by principal component analysis (PCA). Then voxel cells with the same dimensionality are clustered. Next, the Extended Gaussian Image (EGI) descriptor of those voxel clusters are constructed using significant eigenvectors of each voxel in the cluster. Correspondences between clusters in source and target data are obtained according to the similarity between their EGI descriptors. The random sampling consensus (RANSAC) algorithm is employed to remove outlying correspondences until a coarse alignment is obtained. If necessary, a fine registration is performed in a final step. This new method is illustrated on scan data sampling two indoor scenarios. The results of the tests are evaluated by computing the point to point distance between the two input point clouds. The presented two tests resulted in mean distances of 7.6 mm and 9.5 mm respectively, which are adequate for fine registration.