COMPARATIVE STUDY OF AUTOMATIC PLANE FITTING REGISTRATION FOR MLS SPARSE POINT CLOUDS WITH DIFFERENT PLANE SEGMENTATION METHODS

Abstract. The least square plane fitting adjustment method has been widely used for registration of the mobile laser scanning (MLS) point clouds. The inputs for this process are the plane parameters and points of the corresponding planar features. These inputs can be manually and/or automatically extracted from the MLS point clouds. A number of papers have been proposed to automatically extract planar features. They use different criteria to extract planar features and their outputs are slightly different. This will lead to differences in plane parameters values and points of the corresponding features. This research studies and compares the results of the least square plane fitting adjustment process with different inputs obtained by using different segmentation methods (e.g. RANSAC, RDPCA, Cabo, RGPL) and the results from the point to plane approach – an ICP variant. The questions for this research are: (1) which is the more suitable method for registration of MLS sparse point clouds and (2) which is the best segmentation method to obtain the inputs for the plane based MLS point clouds registration? Experiments were conducted with two real MLS point clouds captured by the MDL – Dynascan S250 system. The results show that ICP is less accurate than the least square plane fitting adjustment. It also shows that the accuracy of the plane based registration process is highly correlated with the mean errors of the extracted planar features and the plane parameters. The conclusion is that the RGPL method seems to be the best methods for planar surfaces extraction in MLS sparse point clouds for the registration process.