fast registration method for point clouds using the image information

Abstract

On the existing laser scanners, there usually is a coaxial camera, which could capture images in the scanning site. For the laser scanners with a coaxial camera, we propose a fast registration method using the image information. Unlike the traditional registration methods that computing the rotation and translation simultaneously, our method calculates them individually. The rotation transformation between the point clouds is obtained by the knowledge of the vision geometry and the image information, while their translation is acquired by our improved ICP algorithm. In the improved ICP algorithm, only the translation vector is updated iteratively, whose input is the point clouds that removing the rotation transformation. Experimental results show that the rotation matrix obtained by the images has a high accuracy. In addition, compared with the traditional ICP algorithm, our algorithm converges faster and is easier to fall into the global optimum.