Registration of RGB and thermal point clouds generated by structure from motion

Thermal imaging has become a valuable tool in various fields for remote sensing and can provide relevant information to perform object recognition or classification. In this paper, we present an automated method to obtain a 3D model fusing data from a visible and a thermal camera. The RGB and thermal point clouds are generated independently by structure from motion. The registration process includes a normalization of the point cloud scale, a global registration based on calibration data and the output of the structure from motion, and a fine registration employing a variant of the Iterative Closest Point optimization. Experimental results demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the overall process.