Fast and High Accuracy 3D Point Cloud Registration for Automatic Reconstruction From Laser Scanning Data

Point cloud registration from laser scanning data is a technique to establish the mapping relationship between source and target point clouds, which has been widely used in automatic 3D reconstruction, pose estimation, localization, and navigation. While algorithms like Super4PCS and MSSF-4PCS can achieve registration without initial poses, they are relatively slow, less accurate, and require iterations. To address these issues, we propose a 3D point cloud registration algorithm based on interval segmentation and multi-dimensional feature. Firstly, the source and target point clouds are segmented internally and the point cloud curvature is designed to narrow down the search range for the registration between the segmented point clouds. Secondly, the corresponding four-point sets in the segmented areas of the source and target point clouds are determined using affine invariance constraints. Finally, a multi-dimensional feature vector based on curvature features and fast point feature histogram is established to determine the unique corresponding four-point set pairs, and the rigid body transformation matrix is solved accordingly. Our algorithm is tested on publicly available 3D point cloud data models Bunny, Dino, Dragon, and Horse from Stanford University. Results showed that our algorithm improved registration accuracy by 24.39% and registration efficiency by 46.21% compared to the MSSF-4PCS point cloud registration algorithm. Multiple sets of experimental results confirmed the effectiveness of our algorithm. The proposed 3D point cloud registration is proved to be fast with high accuracy, which can be utilized for automatic segmentation, reconstruction, and modelling from Laser Scanning Data.