Geometric model based registration of terrestrial laser scanning data

This paper presents an approach for the registration of terrestrial laser scanning point clouds based on geometric models while there are no targets in the scanning process. We obtained the axis vectors of the cylinders that are fitted from the segmented point clouds in the overlapping areas. Then we solved the parameters of the rotation and translation by using the axis vectors and the centers of the cylinders. Further, we analyzed the registration accuracy and its influencing factors. The test result shows that the geometric model based approach actually offers high degree of flexibility and meets high accuracy for registering terrestrial laser scanning data.