A precise registration method for large-scale urban point clouds based on phased and spatial geometric features

Abstract. The aim of the research is to evaluate the performance of the point cloud registration methods using mobile laser scanning data. The point cloud registration methods involved in this research are match bounding-box centres and iterative closest point (ICP). The research began with the two epoch’s mobile laser scanning survey using a Phoenix AL-3-32 system. At the same time, the stereo images of the study area were acquired using UAV Photogrammetric method. Both two epoch point cloud datasets were gone through the pre and post-processing stages to produce the cleaned and geo-referenced point clouds data. The data were then gone through the two registration methods and four Cloud-to-Cloud (C2C) distance methods. The 3D surface deviation results obtained from mobile laser scanning data was compared with the 3D surface deviation results from UAV data that undergoes the same registration and C2C distance computation methods. The study area involved in the research is an active landslide area that was located at Kulim Hi-Tech residential area in Kedah state, Malaysia. The study area exposed to the movement of the land which caused cracked to the buildings and drainages. The findings show that the ICP registration becomes the most suitable method to register point clouds dataset that was acquired using mobile laser scanning system. Among the four C2C distance computation methods that was involved in the testing, the least square plane method was the best method to calculate the distance between two sets of point clouds datasets which in turn gave the best results in the process of detecting the movement of the land in the study area.

Three-dimensional point clouds captured by sensors can quantify plant phenotype, which plays an important role in agricultural intelligence. Many scanned objects in agriculture and forestry are tall and obscured by leaves, so point clouds captured by either terrestrial or airborne methods may be incomplete. In order to obtain a more complete point cloud, this paper proposes a point cloud registration method based on the fast point feature histogram (FPFH), which aligns point clouds collected from different viewpoints. This method calculates the FPFH feature of each point and the Bhattacharyya distance between point pairs. Effective strategies pick out reliable sets of point pairs. Singular value decomposition is used to obtain the transformation relationship between point clouds. Experimental results show that the proposed method has high accuracy for plant point cloud registration in real scenes, and the root-mean-square error is smaller than that of common registration methods of SAC-IA and NDT.KeywordsFast point feature histogramBhattacharyya distanceRandom sample consensusPoint cloud registration

Point cloud registration is of great significance to the reconstruction of high‐precision 3D city models. There are some challenges when aligning aerial and close‐range photogrammetric point clouds, such as huge view differences caused by the different sights of the sensors, massive noisy points due to the error in dense matching, and scale uncertainty since there are no control points for absolute orientation. To achieve complementary advantages of aerial and close‐range point clouds, in this paper, a robust cross‐source point clouds registration method is proposed using image visual context features and scale consistency. First, a cross‐view image matching method based on image visual context features is proposed to obtain corresponding points. Second, to overcome the challenges of noisy points and scale differences, an outlier filtering method is designed based on scale consistency. Finally, the dual quaternions model considering the scale factor is introduced to solve the spatial transformation model. To analyze the feasibility of this method qualitatively and quantitatively, experiments are conducted using the public scene dataset of Dortmund, Germany, and the scene dataset of Zhengzhou City, China. Three kinds of cross‐source point clouds registration experiments are conducted in this paper, including aerial and close‐range point clouds registration in Dortmund, and aerial and ground point clouds registrations in both Dortmund and Zhengzhou. The chamfer distances of the three sets of experiments are 4.48 m, 5.97 m and 4.78 m, respectively. The ablation study shows that the outlier filtering method and the dual quaternions model improve the accuracy by at least 14% and 25%, respectively. The experiments demonstrate that the method accomplishes the cross‐source point clouds registration in large‐scale scenes accurately and efficiently, providing a solid foundation for subsequent fine 3D reconstruction.

With the rapid development of binocular reconstruction, fringe projection profilometry, and time of flight, 3D imaging technology has been widely applied in the field of 3D measurement. However, due to limited measurement range and self-occlusion, point cloud registration methods are often used to obtain larger or more complete 3D contours. Although many scholars have proposed various point cloud registration methods, the accuracy and efficiency of point cloud registration still need to be further improved, especially for point clouds with different density or non-rigid transformation. Image registration technology based on image correlation has been developed for many years and has achieved great success in fields such as computer vision, photomechanics, and photogrammetry. Therefore, a simple and direct idea in this paper is to transform the point cloud registration problem into volume image correlation problem. By this, an efficient image registration method based on fast Fourier transform and an inverse compositional Gaussian Newton optimization method that only needs to calculate the Hessian matrix once can be introduced into the point cloud registration field, which can greatly improve the speed and accuracy of point cloud registration. Comparative experiments have shown that our method has doubled the accuracy and efficiency compared to the iterative closest point (ICP) method, and its practicality has also been verified in impeller reconstruction experiments.

The demand for autonomous exploration and mapping of underground environments has significantly increased in recent years. However, accurately localizing and mapping robots in subterranean settings presents notable challenges. This paper presents a tightly coupled LiDAR-Inertial odometry system that combines the NanoGICP point cloud registration method with IMU pre-integration using incremental smoothing and mapping. Specifically, a point cloud affected by dust particles is first filtered out and separated into ground and non-ground point clouds (for ground vehicles). To maintain accuracy in environments with spatial variations, an adaptive voxel filter is employed, which reduces computation time while preserving accuracy. The estimated motion derived from IMU pre-integration is utilized to correct point cloud distortion and provide an initial estimation for LiDAR odometry. Subsequently, a scan-to-map point cloud registration is executed using NanoGICP to obtain a more refined pose estimation. The resulting LiDAR odometry is then employed to estimate the bias of the IMU. We comprehensively evaluated our system on established subterranean datasets. These datasets were collected by two separate teams using different platforms during the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge. The experimental results demonstrate that our system achieved performance enhancements as high as 50-60% in terms of root mean square error (RMSE).

Both UAV photogrammetry and lidar have become common in deriv- ing three-dimensional models of urban scenes, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages. However, the fusion of these multi- source data is still challenging, in which registration is one of the most important stages. In this paper, we propose a method of coarse point cloud registration which consists of two steps. The first step is to extract urban building facades in both an oblique photogram- metric point cloud and a lidar point cloud. The second step is to align the two point clouds using the extracted building facades. Object Vicinity Distribution Feature (Dijkman and Van Den Heuvel 2002) is introduced to describe the distribution of building facades and register the two heterologous point clouds. This method provides a good initial state for later refined registration process and is transla - tion, rotation, and scale invariant. Experiment results show that the accuracy of this proposed automatic registration method is equiva- lent to the accuracy of manual registration with control points.

Abstract. Point cloud registration is the process of transforming multiple point clouds obtained at different locations of the same scene into a common coordinate system, forming an integrated dataset representing the scene surveyed. In addition to the typical target-based registration method, there are various registration methods that are based on using only the point cloud data captured (i.e. cloud-to-cloud methods). Until recently, cloud-to-cloud registration methods have generally adopted a coarse-to-fine optimisation process. The challenges and limitations inherent in this process have shaped the development of point cloud registration and the associated software tools over the past three decades. Based on the success of applying deep learning approaches to imagery data, numerous attempts at applying such approaches to point cloud datasets have received much attention. This study reviews and comment on recent developments in point cloud registration without using any targets and explores remaining issues, based on which recommendations on potential future studies in this topic are made.

Point cloud registration is a central theme in computer vision, with alignment algorithms continuously improving for greater robustness. Commonly used methods evaluate Euclidean distances between point clouds and minimize an objective function, such as Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). However, these approaches are most effective when the point clouds are well-prealigned and issues such as differences in density, noise, holes, and limited overlap can compromise the results. Traditional methods, such as Iterative Closest Point (ICP), require choosing one point cloud as fixed, since Euclidean distances lack commutativity. When only one point cloud has issues, adjustments can be made, but in real scenarios, both point clouds may be affected, often necessitating preprocessing. The authors introduce a novel differential entropy-based metric, designed to serve as the objective function within an optimization framework for fine rigid pairwise 3D point cloud registration, denoted as Iterative Differential Entropy Minimization (IDEM). This metric does not depend on the choice of a fixed point cloud and, during transformations, reveals a clear minimum corresponding to the best alignment. Multiple case studies are conducted, and the results are compared with those obtained using RMSE, Chamfer distance, and Hausdorff distance. The proposed metric proves effective even with density differences, noise, holes, and partial overlap, where RMSE does not always yield optimal alignment.

Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) has an important application in the petroleum field, which is often used to analyze the microstructure of reservoir rocks, etc. Most of these analyses are based on two-dimensional images. In fact, SEM can carry out micro-nano scale three-dimensional measurement, and three-dimensional models can provide more accurate information than two-dimensional images. Among the commonly used SEM 3D reconstruction methods, parallax depth mapping is the most commonly used method. Multiple SEM images can be obtained by continuously tilting the sample table at a certain Angle, and multiple point clouds can be generated according to the parallax depth mapping method, and a more complete point clouds recovery can be achieved by combining the point clouds registration. However, the root mean square error of the point clouds generated by this method is relatively large and unstable after participating in point clouds registration. Therefore, this paper proposes a new method for generating point clouds. Firstly, the sample stage is rotated by a certain angle to obtain two SEM images. This operation makes the rotation matrix a known quantity. Then, based on the imaging model, an equation system is constructed to estimate the unknown translation parameters, and finally, triangulation is used to obtain the point clouds. The method proposed in this paper was tested on a publicly available 3D SEM image set, and the results showed that compared to the disparity depth mapping method, the point clouds generated by our method showed a significant reduction in root mean square error and relative rotation error in point clouds registration.

With the widespread application of large-scale 3D point cloud data in real-world scenarios, efficient and accurate point cloud registration has become a crucial challenge. We propose an end-to-end point cloud registration method based on the Transformer architecture. This method addresses the issues of low overlap and registration in large scenes, exhibiting strong algorithmic versatility and efficiency. We introduce a combination of dynamic position encoding and ternary angular position encoding within the Transformer, effectively enhancing the representation capability of point cloud data and algorithmic generality, thus better tackling point cloud registration challenges in large scenes. Additionally, to enhance the learning capacity of the attention mechanism, we employ an improved cross-attention mechanism that multiplies the softmax with adaptive weights, enabling the model to capture key information within the point cloud more accurately. In the decoding stage, we introduce a multi-scale feature fusion approach that fully exploits the multi-layer information in point cloud data, further improving registration accuracy and robustness. Through the fusion of multi-scale features, we effectively mitigate information loss and handle matching problems between point clouds of varying sizes. Experimental results demonstrate the excellence of our method in addressing low overlap and registration tasks in large scenes, validated across multiple datasets including 3DMatch, ModelNet, KITTI, and MVP-RG.

Plant phenotypic analysis is of great importance to the development of agricultural engineering, and is one of the core issues in crop science and plant breeding. Since plant growth is spatio-temporal and synchronous, understanding the growth and development of individual plants can help to reveal the growth potential of the whole plot and thus improve planting methods. In recent years, the technical means to analyze the growth situation using 3D point cloud data has received extensive attention. The plant point cloud obtained by scanning plants with LiDAR has the characteristics of high resolution, high precision, etc. Periodic scanning of the same plant for spatio-temporal point cloud data sets allows monitoring of growth through subtle changes of plant organs. Organ tracking of growing plants remains challenging due to the lightward nature of growth, the potential for topological changes and the unpredictability of plant growth over time, with the possibility of new leaf growth and leaf death. This paper designs a plant organ growth tracking method based on point cloud. First of all, for growing plants, we have established a crop point cloud spatio-temporal dataset based on two publicly available point cloud datasets. The data set includes four species, tomato, tobacco, sorghum and maize, each species contains complete organ instance labels, and each organ of the same plant has a unique label, which means that the labels of the same organ of an individual at different scan dates correspond one-to-one. Second, this paper proposes a point cloud data-based plant organ growth tracking method, which uses a cost correlation matrix to automatically track growing plant organs. Finally, based on the set of quantitative evaluation metrics, our algorithm achieves a matching accuracy of 82.89% on the plant spatio-temporal dataset and good growth tracking results in the qualitative analysis.

Partial point cloud registration is an essential and fundamental component of generating complete 3D shapes, aiming at converting partial scans into a unified coordinate system. However, existing point cloud registration methods suffer from inadequately rich local feature extraction and feature interaction. In addition, these methods still face challenges in modeling the global contextual information of point clouds sufficiently, which limits the improvement in registration effectiveness, especially for partial-to-partial point cloud registration with high noise. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes an enhanced PointNet and assignable weights transformer network (LFA-Net) for partial point cloud registration. The model achieves coarse-to-fine point cloud registration through three core modules. First, the Sufficient Local Feature Extraction Module (LFM) is constructed to extract various local feature information. Then, the Adequate Feature Aggregation Module (FAM) is designed to integrate the feature information from different point clouds. Finally, the Assignable Weights Transformer Module (ATM) is presented to stimulate the model’s global modeling ability during the registration process, enabling the selection of representative points for optimal point cloud registration. Extensive experiments conducted on ModelNet40 using partially overlapping point clouds illustrate the superior registration performance of LFA-Net compared with other state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, Numerous experiments on synthetic and real-word datasets further indicate that LFA-Net also has significant advantages in registering partial point clouds with noise and unseen categories, which demonstrates its excellent robustness and generalization ability for real-world practical application.

As buildings have almost come to a saturation point in most developed countries, the management and maintenance of existing buildings have become the major problem of the field. Building Information Modeling (BIM) is the underlying technology to solve this problem. It is a 3D semantic representation of building construction and facilities that contributes to not only the design phase but also the construction and maintenance phases, such as life-cycle management and building energy performance measurement. This study aims at the processes of creating as-built BIM models, which are constructed after the design phase. Point cloud, a set of points in 3D space, is an intermediate product of as-built BIM models that is often acquired by 3D laser scanning and photogrammetry. A raw point cloud typically requires further procedures, e.g. registration, segmentation, classification, etc. In terms of segmentation and classification, machine learning methodologies are trending due to the enhanced speed of computation. However, supervised machine learning methodologies require labelling the training point clouds in advance, which is time-consuming and often leads to inevitable errors. And due to the complexity and uncertainty of real-world environments, the attributes of one point vary from the attributes of others. These situations make it difficult to analyze how one single attribute contributes to the result of segmentation and classification. This study developed a method of producing point clouds from a fast-generating 3D virtual indoor environment using procedural modeling. This research focused on two attributes of simulated point clouds, point density and the level of random errors. According to Silverman (1986), point density is associated with the point features around each output raster cell. The number of points within a neighborhood divided the area of the neighborhood is the point density. However, in this study, there was a little different. The point density was defined as the number of points on a surface divided by the surface area. And the unit is points per square meters (pts/m2). This research compared the performances of a machine learning segmentation and classification algorithm on ten different point cloud datasets. The mean loss and accuracy of segmentation and classification were analyzed and evaluated to show how the point density and level of random errors affect the performance of the segmentation and classification models. Moreover, the real-world point cloud data were used as additional data to evaluate the applicability of produced models.

Abstract. The registration of ground laser point cloud and close-range image is the key content of high-precision 3D reconstruction of cultural relic object. In view of the requirement of high texture resolution in the field of cultural relic at present, The registration of point cloud and image data in object reconstruction will result in the problem of point cloud to multiple images. In the current commercial software, the two pairs of registration of the two kinds of data are realized by manually dividing point cloud data, manual matching point cloud and image data, manually selecting a two – dimensional point of the same name of the image and the point cloud, and the process not only greatly reduces the working efficiency, but also affects the precision of the registration of the two, and causes the problem of the color point cloud texture joint. In order to solve the above problems, this paper takes the whole object image as the intermediate data, and uses the matching technology to realize the automatic one-to-one correspondence between the point cloud and multiple images. The matching of point cloud center projection reflection intensity image and optical image is applied to realize the automatic matching of the same name feature points, and the Rodrigo matrix spatial similarity transformation model and weight selection iteration are used to realize the automatic registration of the two kinds of data with high accuracy. This method is expected to serve for the high precision and high efficiency automatic 3D reconstruction of cultural relic objects, which has certain scientific research value and practical significance.

The challenges of point cloud registration in intelligent vehicle driving lie in the large scale, complex distribution, high noise, and strong sparsity of lidar point cloud data. This paper proposes an efficient registration algorithm for large-scale outdoor road scenes by selecting the continuous distribution of key area laser point clouds as the registration point cloud. The algorithm extracts feature descriptions of the key point cloud and introduces local geometric features of the point cloud to complete rough and fine registration under constraints of key point clouds and point cloud features. The algorithm is verified through extensive experiments under multiple scenarios, with an average registration time of 0.5831 s and an average accuracy of 0.06996 m, showing significant improvement compared to other algorithms. The algorithm is also validated through real-vehicle experiments, demonstrating strong versatility, reliability, and efficiency. This research has the potential to improve environment perception capabilities of autonomous vehicles by solving the point cloud registration problem in large outdoor scenes.