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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ISPRS-Archives</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">2194-9034</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/isprs-archives-L-4-W2-2026-179-2026</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Beyond Accuracy: A Computational–Robustness Comparison of Point Cloud Registration Algorithms</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Rocha</surname>
<given-names>Ezequiel Silva</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0002-3816-3908</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Maia</surname>
<given-names>Aluizio Brito</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>de Almeida</surname>
<given-names>Cláudia Maria</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Ruiz</surname>
<given-names>Paulo Roberto da Silva</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>da Silva</surname>
<given-names>Matheus Ferreira</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>da Silva</surname>
<given-names>Rahuan Miguel</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Tommaselli</surname>
<given-names>Antonio Maria Garcia</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0483-1103</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff4">
<sup>4</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Arraut</surname>
<given-names>Eduardo Moraes</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5323-4431</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Aeronautics Institute of Technology, São José dos Campos, Brazil</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>National Institute for Space Research - INPE, São José dos Campos, Brazil</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>São Paulo State Technological Colleges - FATEC, Adamantina, Brazil</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff4">
<label>4</label>
<addr-line>São Paulo State University - UNESP, Presidente Prudente, Brazil</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>28</day>
<month>09</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>L-4/W2-2026</volume>
<fpage>179</fpage>
<lpage>184</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Ezequiel Silva Rocha et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/L-4-W2-2026/179/2026/isprs-archives-L-4-W2-2026-179-2026.html">This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/L-4-W2-2026/179/2026/isprs-archives-L-4-W2-2026-179-2026.html</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/L-4-W2-2026/179/2026/isprs-archives-L-4-W2-2026-179-2026.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/L-4-W2-2026/179/2026/isprs-archives-L-4-W2-2026-179-2026.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>The digital documentation of cultural heritage increasingly relies on the fusion of multi-source data to overcome the limitations of individual sensors. This study evaluates the performance of four registration algorithms, Iterative Closest Point (ICP), RANSAC, Fast Global Registration (FGR), and FilterReg, applied to the fusion of Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) and UAV-based Structure-from- Motion (SfM) point clouds of the Engenho Central do Bracuhy ruins in Brazil. Given the challenging nature of the dataset, characterized by non-uniform density and inherent SfM noise, we utilized the Multimetric Computational-Prediction Efficiency Index (MCPEI) to jointly assess accuracy and processing time. Results indicate that probabilistic methods, specifically FilterReg, outperform geometric-based approaches in multimodal scenarios. FilterReg demonstrated superior performance to Gaussian noise and outliers, maintaining high efficiency scores (&amp;gt; 0.85) where FGR failed to converge. Furthermore, it exhibited rotation invariance without requiring coarse initialization. These findings suggest that probabilistic filtering is a more suitable paradigm for the automated documentation of complex heritage sites than traditional deterministic optimization.</p>
</abstract>
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