Simultaneous Co-registration and Georeferencing of Multiple Pointclouds

A method for the simultaneous co-registration and georeferencing of multiple 3D pointclouds and associated intensity information is proposed. It is a generalization of the 3D surface matching problem. The simultaneous co-registration provides for a strict solution to the problem, as opposed to sequential pairwise registration. The problem is formulated as the Least Squares matching of overlapping 3D surfaces. The parameters of 3D transformations of multiple surfaces are simultaneously estimated, using the Generalized Gauss-Markoff model, minimizing the sum of squares of the Euclidean distances among the surfaces. This method can be applied to data sets generated from aerial as well as terrestrial laser scanning or other pointcloud generating methods.