Registration of partially overlapping laser-radar range images

To register partially overlapping three-dimensional point sets from different viewpoints, it is necessary to remove spurious corresponding point pairs that are not located in overlapping regions. Most variants of the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm require users to manually select the rejection parameters for discarding spurious point pairs between the registering views. This requirement often results in unreliable and inaccurate registration. To overcome this problem, we present an improved ICP algorithm that can automatically determine the rejection percentage to reliably and accurately align partially overlapping laser-radar (ladar) range images. The similarity of k neighboring features of each nonplanar point is employed to determine reasonable point pairs in nonplanar regions, and the distance measurement method is used to find reasonable point pairs in planar regions. The rejection percentage can be obtained from these two sets of reasonable pairs. The performance of our algorithm is compared with that of five other algorithms using various models with low and high curvatures. The experimental results show that our algorithm is more accurate and robust than the other algorithms.