A COMPARATIVE STUDY AMONG THREE REGISTRATION ALGORITHMS: PERFORMANCE, QUALITY ASSURANCE AND ACCURACY

Abstract. A critical task in every terrestrial laser scanning project is the transformation (addressed to as registration or alignment) of multiple point clouds into a common reference system. Even though this operation appears to be a solved and well-understood problem, the vast majority of available techniques still lack meaningful quality measures that allow the user to understand and analyze the final outputs. The erroneous estimation of registration parameters may cause systematic biases that falsify those subsequently outcomes such as deformation measurements on historical buildings, CAD-drawings of individual elements, or 3D models devoted to analyze the verticality of a tower. Thus, this article compares three common registration algorithms, namely target-based registration, the Iterative-Closest Point algorithm (ICP) as well as a plane-based approach on examples related to different case studies concerning historical buildings.