Precise plane registration with multiple geometric feature matching and weighted least squares estimation

Point cloud registration is a fundamental problem for 3D laser scanning technology, which is extensively applied in geographic entity modelling such as 3D reconstruction of urban roads and buildings. Registration accuracy is one of the main focuses for these applications. However, noisy points, limited overlap, varying data sources, and differing measuring accuracy may cause changes between point cloud sets and reduce registration accuracy. This paper introduces an automatic plane registration method for urban roads and building scenes, which does not need manual on-site deployment. Firstly, plane primitives are extracted using voxel-based filtering region growth. Next, corresponding planes for the extracted primitives are identified by leveraging saliency features and constructing adjacency matrices. Finally, plane registration is achieved using a weighted plane coordinate conversion model. Through real-world scene experimentation, an overall accuracy of 10 cm and a segmental registration accuracy of 5–6 cm is achieved with our method, outperforming both feature point-based and global point cloud registration approaches in terms of efficiency and accuracy.