PERSPECTIVE INTENSITY IMAGES FOR CO-REGISTRATION OF TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNER AND DIGITAL CAMERA

Co-registration of terrestrial laser scanner and digital camera has been an important topic of research, since reconstruction of visually appealing and measurable models of the scanned objects can be achieved by using both point clouds and digital images. This paper presents an approach for co-registration of terrestrial laser scanner and digital camera. A perspective intensity image of the point cloud is firstly generated by using the collinearity equation. Then corner points are extracted from the generated perspective intensity image and the camera image. The fundamental matrix F is then estimated using several interactively selected tie points and used to obtain more matches with RANSAC. The 3D coordinates of all the matched tie points are directly obtained or estimated using the least squares method. The robustness and effectiveness of the presented methodology is demonstrated by the experimental results. Methods presented in this work may also be used for automatic registration of terrestrial laser scanning point clouds.