Robust Automatic Marker-free Registration of Terrestrial Scan Data

Terrestrial laser scanning systems have become widely available during the past years. Raw data acquired by such systems typically consists of separate overlapping datasets – each in its own local coordinate system. Applications that need data from more than a single scan position therefore must be preceded by a registration of all scans into a common geometric reference frame. In this paper, a novel method for the automatic and marker-free coarse registration of terrestrial laser scan data is presented. It is based on matching planes in object space and is thus especially suitable for scenarios that are dominated by planar structures such as built-up areas. First, suitable planes are extracted from the raw point cloud in a robust way. Then, the automatic coarse registration is carried out based on correspondences of single plane pairs. Results are shown for test data constisting of 26 datasets of a small village.