Automatic Registration of Approximately Leveled Point Clouds of Urban Scenes

Registration of point clouds is a necessary step to obtain a complete overview of scanned objects of interest. The majority of the current registration approaches target the general case where a full range of the registration parameters search space is assumed and searched. It is very common in urban objects scanning to have leveled point clouds with small roll and pitch angles and with also a small height differences. For such scenarios the registration search problem can be handled faster to obtain a coarse registration of two point clouds. In this paper, a fully automatic approach is proposed for registration of approximately leveled point clouds. The proposed approach estimates a coarse registration based on three registration parameters and then conducts a fine registration step using iterative closest point approach. The approach has been tested on three data sets of different areas and the achieved registration results validate the significance of the proposed approach.