AUTOMATED FEATURE BASED TLS DATA REGISTRATION FOR 3D BUILDING MODELING

Abstract. In this paper we present a novel method for the registration of point cloud data obtained using terrestrial laser scanner (TLS). The final goal of our investigation is the automated reconstruction of CAD drawings and the 3D modeling of objects surveyed by TLS. Because objects are scanned from multiple positions, individual point cloud need to be registered to the same coordinate system. We propose in this paper an automated feature based registration procedure. Our proposed method does not require the definition of initial values or the placement of targets and is robust against noise and background elements. A feature extraction procedure is performed for each point cloud as pre-processing. The registration of the point clouds from different viewpoints is then performed by utilizing the extracted features. The feature extraction method which we had developed previously (Kitamura, 2010) is used: planes and edges are extracted from the point cloud. By utilizing these features, the amount of information to process is reduced and the efficiency of the whole registration procedure is increased. In this paper, we describe the proposed algorithm and, in order to demonstrate its effectiveness, we show the results obtained by using real data.