Fast and Automatic Registration of Terrestrial Point Clouds Using 2D Line Features

Point cloud registration, as the first step for the use of point cloud data, has attracted increasing attention. In order to obtain the entire point cloud of a scene, the registration of point clouds from multiple views is necessary. In this paper, we propose an automatic method for the coarse registration of point clouds. The 2D lines are first extracted from the two point clouds being matched. Then, the line correspondences are established and the 2D transformation is calculated. Finally, a method is developed to calculate the displacement along the z-axis. With the 2D transformation and displacement, the 3D transformation can be easily achieved. Thus, the two point clouds are aligned together. The experimental results well demonstrate that our method can obtain high-precision registration results and is computationally very efficient. In the experimental results obtained by our method, the biggest rotation error is 0.5219°, and the biggest horizontal and vertical errors are 0.2319 m and 0.0119 m, respectively. The largest total computation time is only 713.4647 s.