scholarly journals A Fast Point Clouds Registration Algorithm for Laser Scanners

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 3426
Author(s):  
Guangxuan Xu ◽  
Yajun Pang ◽  
Zhenxu Bai ◽  
Yulei Wang ◽  
Zhiwei Lu

Point clouds registration is an important step for laser scanner data processing, and there have been numerous methods. However, the existing methods often suffer from low accuracy and low speed when registering large point clouds. To meet this challenge, an improved iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm combining random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm, intrinsic shape signatures (ISS), and 3D shape context (3DSC) is proposed. The proposed method firstly uses voxel grid filter for down-sampling. Next, the feature points are extracted by the ISS algorithm and described by the 3DSC. Afterwards, the ISS-3DSC features are used for rough registration with the RANSAC algorithm. Finally, the ICP algorithm is used for accurate registration. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm has faster registration speed than the compared algorithms, while maintaining high registration accuracy.

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 2263
Author(s):  
Haileleol Tibebu ◽  
Jamie Roche ◽  
Varuna De Silva ◽  
Ahmet Kondoz

Creating an accurate awareness of the environment using laser scanners is a major challenge in robotics and auto industries. LiDAR (light detection and ranging) is a powerful laser scanner that provides a detailed map of the environment. However, efficient and accurate mapping of the environment is yet to be obtained, as most modern environments contain glass, which is invisible to LiDAR. In this paper, a method to effectively detect and localise glass using LiDAR sensors is proposed. This new approach is based on the variation of range measurements between neighbouring point clouds, using a two-step filter. The first filter examines the change in the standard deviation of neighbouring clouds. The second filter uses a change in distance and intensity between neighbouring pules to refine the results from the first filter and estimate the glass profile width before updating the cartesian coordinate and range measurement by the instrument. Test results demonstrate the detection and localisation of glass and the elimination of errors caused by glass in occupancy grid maps. This novel method detects frameless glass from a long range and does not depend on intensity peak with an accuracy of 96.2%.


Forests ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 599 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ravaglia ◽  
Fournier ◽  
Bac ◽  
Véga ◽  
Côté ◽  
...  

Terrestrial laser scanners provide accurate and detailed point clouds of forest plots, which can be used as an alternative to destructive measurements during forest inventories. Various specialized algorithms have been developed to provide automatic and objective estimates of forest attributes from point clouds. The STEP (Snakes for Tuboid Extraction from Point cloud) algorithm was developed to estimate both stem diameter at breast height and stem diameters along the bole length. Here, we evaluate the accuracy of this algorithm and compare its performance with two other state-of-the-art algorithms that were designed for the same purpose (i.e., the CompuTree and SimpleTree algorithms). We tested each algorithm against point clouds that incorporated various degrees of noise and occlusion. We applied these algorithms to three contrasting test sites: (1) simulated scenes of coniferous stands in Newfoundland (Canada), (2) test sites of deciduous stands in Phalsbourg (France), and (3) coniferous plantations in Quebec, Canada. In most cases, the STEP algorithm predicted diameter at breast height with higher R2 and lower RMSE than the other two algorithms. The STEP algorithm also achieved greater accuracy when estimating stem diameter in occluded and noisy point clouds, with mean errors in the range of 1.1 cm to 2.28 cm. The CompuTree and SimpleTree algorithms respectively produced errors in the range of 2.62 cm to 6.1 cm and 1.03 cm to 3.34 cm, respectively. Unlike CompuTree or SimpleTree, the STEP algorithm was not able to estimate trunk diameter in the uppermost portions of the trees. Our results show that the STEP algorithm is more adapted to extract DBH and stem diameter automatically from occluded and noisy point clouds. Our study also highlights that SimpleTree and CompuTree require data filtering and results corrections. Conversely, none of these procedures were applied for the implementation of the STEP algorithm.


Author(s):  
S. Nikoohemat ◽  
M. Peter ◽  
S. Oude Elberink ◽  
G. Vosselman

The use of Indoor Mobile Laser Scanners (IMLS) for data collection in indoor environments has been increasing in the recent years. These systems, unlike Terrestrial Laser Scanners (TLS), collect data along a trajectory instead of at discrete scanner positions. In this research, we propose several methods to exploit the trajectories of IMLS systems for the interpretation of point clouds. By means of occlusion reasoning and use of trajectory as a set of scanner positions, we are capable of detecting openings in cluttered indoor environments. In order to provide information about both the partitioning of the space and the navigable space, we use the voxel concept for point clouds. Furthermore, to reconstruct walls, floor and ceiling we exploit the indoor topology and plane primitives. The results show that the trajectory is a valuable source of data for feature detection and understanding of indoor MLS point clouds.


Author(s):  
Atticus E. L. Stovall ◽  
Jeff W Atkins

The increasingly affordable price point of terrestrial laser scanners has led to a democratization of instrument availability, but the most common low-cost instruments have yet to be compared in terms of the consistency to measure forest structural attributes. Here, we compared two low-cost terrestrial laser scanners (TLS): the Leica BLK360 and the Faro Focus 120 3D. We evaluate the instruments in terms of point cloud quality, forest inventory estimates, tree-model reconstruction, and foliage profile reconstruction. Our direct comparison of the point clouds showed reduced noise in filtered Leica data. Tree diameter and height were consistent across instruments (4.4% and 1.4% error, respectively). Volumetric tree models were less consistent across instruments, with ~29% bias, depending on model reconstruction quality. In the process of comparing foliage profiles, we conducted a sensitivity analysis of factors affecting foliage profile estimates, showing a minimal effect from instrument maximum range (for forests less than ~50 m in height) and surprisingly little impact from degraded scan resolution. Filtered unstructured TLS point clouds must be artificially re-gridded to provide accurate foliage profiles. The factors evaluated in this comparison point towards necessary considerations for future low-cost laser scanner development and application in detecting forest structural parameters.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vítor Amaral ◽  
Francisco Marques ◽  
André Lourenço ◽  
José Barata ◽  
Pedro Santana

This paper presents a system for obstacle detection in railway level crossings from 3D point clouds acquired with tilting 2D laser scanners. Although large obstacles in railway level crossings are detectable with current solutions, the detection of small obstacles remains an open problem. By relying on a tilting laser scanner, the proposed system is able to acquire highly dense and accurate point clouds, enabling the detection of small obstacles, like rocks laying near the rail. During an offline training phase, the system learns a background model of the level crossing from a set of point clouds. Then, online, obstacles are detected as occupied space contrasting with the background model. To reduce the need for manual on-site calibration, the system automatically estimates the pose of the level crossing and railway with respect to the laser scanner. Experimental results show the ability of the system to successfully perform on a set of 41 point clouds acquired in an operational one-lane level crossing.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (13) ◽  
pp. 4448
Author(s):  
Jianjian Yang ◽  
Chao Wang ◽  
Wenjie Luo ◽  
Yuchen Zhang ◽  
Boshen Chang ◽  
...  

In order to meet the needs of intelligent perception of the driving environment, a point cloud registering method based on 3D NDT-ICP algorithm is proposed to improve the modeling accuracy of tunneling roadway environments. Firstly, Voxel Grid filtering method is used to preprocess the point cloud of tunneling roadways to maintain the overall structure of the point cloud and reduce the number of point clouds. After that, the 3D NDT algorithm is used to solve the coordinate transformation of the point cloud in the tunneling roadway and the cell resolution of the algorithm is optimized according to the environmental features of the tunneling roadway. Finally, a kd-tree is introduced into the ICP algorithm for point pair search, and the Gauss–Newton method is used to optimize the solution of nonlinear objective function of the algorithm to complete accurate registering of tunneling roadway point clouds. The experimental results show that the 3D NDT algorithm can meet the resolution requirement when the cell resolution is set to 0.5 m under the condition of processing the point cloud with the environmental features of tunneling roadways. At this time, the registering time is the shortest. Compared with the NDT algorithm, ICP algorithm and traditional 3D NDT-ICP algorithm, the registering speed of the 3D NDT-ICP algorithm proposed in this paper is obviously improved and the registering error is smaller.


Author(s):  
S. Hosseinyalamdary ◽  
A. Yilmaz

Laser scanner point cloud has been emerging in Photogrammetry and computer vision to achieve high level tasks such as object tracking, object recognition and scene understanding. However, low cost laser scanners are noisy, sparse and prone to systematic errors. This paper proposes a novel 3D super resolution approach to reconstruct surface of the objects in the scene. This method works on sparse, unorganized point clouds and has superior performance over other surface recovery approaches. Since the proposed approach uses anisotropic diffusion equation, it does not deteriorate the object boundaries and it preserves topology of the object.


Author(s):  
T. Ogawa ◽  
Y. Hori

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Recently operation systems of laser scanning have been obviously improved; for instance shape matching has been equipped with software on a post processing stage so measurement without any targets is a prerequisite condition of field surveying with laser scanners. Moreover a shape matching method enables us to easily register a pair of point clouds with some errors even if those data are scanned by several type scanners. Those slightly errors can influence accuracy of alignments if the object is large to require a lot of scans. Laser scanning data has random errors and accuracy of alignments can be improved by matching error distributions of pairs of point clouds to natural distributions. This method is called “best fitting” in contrast “shape matching” in a software, PolyWorks |Inspector. In this paper, accuracy of alignments between shape matching and best fitting is discussed. The scan data of three phaseshift laser scanners (FARO Focus 3D MS120, FARO Focus 3D X330 and Z+F Imager 5016) and two time-of-flight scanners (Leica BLK 360 and Leica Scan station C5) are used for analyses. Accuracy of alignments by using shape matching and best fitting methods is demonstrated by showing points of scan data with histograms of error distributions.</p>


Author(s):  
Y. D. Rajendra ◽  
S. C. Mehrotra ◽  
K. V. Kale ◽  
R. R. Manza ◽  
R. K. Dhumal ◽  
...  

Terrestrial Laser Scanners (TLS) are used to get dense point samples of large object’s surface. TLS is new and efficient method to digitize large object or scene. The collected point samples come into different formats and coordinates. Different scans are required to scan large object such as heritage site. Point cloud registration is considered as important task to bring different scans into whole 3D model in one coordinate system. Point clouds can be registered by using one of the three ways or combination of them, Target based, feature extraction, point cloud based. For the present study we have gone through Point Cloud Based registration approach. We have collected partially overlapped 3D Point Cloud data of Department of Computer Science & IT (DCSIT) building located in Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Marathwada University, Aurangabad. To get the complete point cloud information of the building we have taken 12 scans, 4 scans for exterior and 8 scans for interior façade data collection. There are various algorithms available in literature, but Iterative Closest Point (ICP) is most dominant algorithms. The various researchers have developed variants of ICP for better registration process. The ICP point cloud registration algorithm is based on the search of pairs of nearest points in a two adjacent scans and calculates the transformation parameters between them, it provides advantage that no artificial target is required for registration process. We studied and implemented three variants Brute Force, KDTree, Partial Matching of ICP algorithm in MATLAB. The result shows that the implemented version of ICP algorithm with its variants gives better result with speed and accuracy of registration as compared with CloudCompare Open Source software.


Author(s):  
M. Hossein Pouraghdam ◽  
M. Saadatseresht ◽  
H. Rastiveis ◽  
A. Abzal ◽  
M. Hasanlou

Abstract. In recent years, the applications of interior and exterior model of buildings have been increased in the field of surveying and mapping. This paper presents a new method for extracting a two-dimensional (2D) floor plan of a building from Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)-based point clouds. In the proposed algorithm, after preprocessing, the voxel space is generated for the point cloud. Then, the optimal section of the voxel cube to generate building floor plan is identified. Finally, the linear structures and walls are extracted using the random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm. The proposed algorithm was examined on a collected point clouds of a building, and the walls of this building were automatically extracted. To evaluate the proposed method, the obtained walls by the algorithm were compared with the manually extracted walls. The algorithm successfully extracted almost 90% of the walls in the test area. Moreover, the average error of 3 cm for the extracted walls proved the high accuracy of the proposed method for building floor plan modeling.


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