The Evaluation of CloudCompare Software in the Process of TLS Point Clouds Registration

Terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) is a wide used technique to record objects, especially buildings. Multiple scans are required in order to measure a large object, the process of bringing in coincidence the resulted point clouds being necessary. This is the first and the most important step in the process of the 3D model creation, therefore the registration process should be as accurate as possible. Different methods are mentioned in literature for registration, most of them using common features like points, lines, planes, spheres, automatically or manually measured within the point clouds. In this paper, the tie point-based registration approach for TLS point clouds implemented in “CloudCompare” software was evaluated in terms of accuracy. To obtain the results, two TLS point clouds were used and five point pairs were manually chosen and measured. The estimation of the registration parameters of two point clouds was made by using 3D conformal transformation and the least squares methods.