Efficient and Accurate Registration of Point Clouds with Plane to Plane Correspondences

W. Förstner, K. Khoshelham

Abstract: We propose and analyse methods to efficiently register point clouds based on plane correspondences. This is relevant in man-made environments, where most objects are bounded by planar surfaces. Based on a segmentation of the point clouds into planar regions and matches of planes in different point clouds, we (1) optimally estimate the relative pose(s); (2) provide three direct solutions, of which two take the uncertainty of the given planes into account; and (3) analyse the loss in accuracy of the direct solutions as compared to the optimal solution. The paper presents the different solutions, derives their uncertainty especially of the suboptimal direct solutions, and compares their accuracy based on simulated and real data. We show that the direct methods that exploit the uncertainty of the planes lead to a maximum loss of 2.76 in accuracy of the estimated motion parameters in terms of the achieved standard deviations compared to the optimal estimates. We also show that the results are more accurate than the classical iterative closest point and iterative closest plane method, but the estimation procedures have a significantly lower computational complexity. We finally show how to generalize the estimation scheme to simultaneously register multiple point clouds.