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Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017).

"Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar

Features for Construction Environments

Pileun Kim1, Jingdao Chen2, and Yong K Cho3


1
Ph. D. Student, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Georgia Institute of

Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, 30332-0355; Phone (+1) 678 735 1781; email:

pkim45@gatech.edu
2
Ph. D. Student, Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Georgia Institute of Technology,

777 Atlantic Dr. N.W., Atlanta, GA, USA, 30332-0355; Phone (+1) 314 489 3172; E-Mail:

jchen490@gatech.edu
3
Corresponding Author, Associate Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental

Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, 30332-0355; Phone (+1) 404

385 2038; FAX 404 894 2278; email: yong.cho@ce.gatech.edu

ABSTRACT

Due to the limited view of each single laser scan data, multiple scans are required to cover all

scenes of the large construction site, and a registration process is needed to merge them together.

While many research efforts have been made on the automatic point cloud registration, however

the prior works have some limitations; the automatic registration was tested in a bounded region

and required a large overlapped area between scans. The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel

method that achieves the automatic point cloud registration in an unbounded region and with a

relatively small overlapped area without using artificial targets, landmarks, or any other manual
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

alignment process. For the automatic point cloud registration, the proposed framework utilizes the

feature detection algorithms commonly used in computer vision to identify geometric

correspondences among the series of scans for the initial alignment. Then, it computes the

overlapped area between scans and determines a method to use for the final alignment. If the

overlapped area is sufficiently large, the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm is used to generate

the proper transformation. Otherwise, a plane matching algorithm is used to achieve precise

registration. The proposed framework was tested at outdoor construction sites and an indoor

environment, which resulted in deviation angle accuracy of less than 0.35o for outdoor and 0.13o

for indoor testbeds respectively with processing time of less than four minutes. These promising

results demonstrate that the proposed target-free automatic registration method can significantly

reduce the manual registration time and data gathering time without compromising the registration

accuracy, thus simplifying and promoting the laser scanning practices in the AEC/FM industry.

Introduction

Extracting 3D geometric information of buildings and other infrastructure is valuable in many

ways for structural damage assessment, urban planning, historical building restoration, building

renovation, facility management, and building energy analyses. With the recent advancement of

sensing technologies, both terrestrial laser scanning and computer vision-based techniques have

been extensively studied in those areas (Brilakis et al. 2010; Ham and Golparvar-Fard 2013, 2014;

Olsen et al. 2010; Tang et al. 2010; Wang et al. 2013; Wang and Cho 2014; Rashidi et al. 2015).

While both the approaches have strengths and weaknesses based on working environments and

data quality requirements, computer vision-based techniques cannot generally provide the same

level of accuracy as that of laser scanners (Dai et al. 2013; Golparvar-Fard et al. 2011). Especially,

1
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

3D laser scanning technology has been extensively used in construction to render real-sized objects

or environments in the form of dense point cloud data (Cho and Haas 2003; Wang and Cho 2015).

This is because current laser scanners are less sensitive to lighting conditions (Cho and Gai 2014)

and have become faster with higher data collection rates, smaller and more affordable. Further, a

virtual 3D model of a construction site through point cloud mapping and registration can improve

the ability to understand the scene of interest, track the construction progress (Golparvar-Fard et

al. 2009), monitor the structural health (Park et al. 2007) and recognize potential safety hazards

(Fekete et al. 2010).

An entire construction site covers a large area, so it is necessary to collect scans from

multiple points of view to get a full reconstruction of the site. All the individual point clouds

collected in the local coordinate frame must be transformed to a global coordinate system through

a procedure known as point cloud registration. Registration of point clouds is defined as fitting and

matching multiple point clouds scanned from different viewpoints into one common coordinate

system, which transforms each point cloud set from its local coordinate frame to a global

coordinate frame. However, the raw 3D scanned point cloud data can often be distorted by

obstacles or sensor noise. Because of these varieties of challenges, automating the registration of

point clouds is a uniquely complex research problem.

Literature Review

There has been a considerable amount of research in registering multi-view point clouds, which

can be classified into two categories depending on the use of registration targets. One of the

traditional approaches to point cloud registration is to place artificial targets (i.e. spheres,

checkerboards, etc.) visible within separate but overlapping point clouds, which is known as target-

2
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

based registration. Becerik-gerber et al. (2011) proposed a 3D target-based point cloud registration

method. They experimented with three different types of targets such as fixed paper, paddle, and

sphere, and with phased-based, time-of-flight laser scanners. According to their experiments, the

spherical target with time-of-flight scanner provided the most accurate results. Kim et al. (2011)

developed a system for ship fabrication, which used spherical targets attached to an object of

interest for merging point clouds. However, their target-based point cloud registration requires

extra time and effort for installing and adjusting the targets at every scan. Also, their use of targets

necessitates extra costs, making it less desirable on large and complex construction sites.

The other approach to point cloud registration is to use image processing methods and

iterative algorithms instead of artificial targets. Böhm and Becker (2007) tried to register terrestrial

laser scan data without markers using Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) key points

extracted from the reflectance data. However, their target point cloud is only a single building and

does not include the scattered surroundings. Moussa et al. (2012) and Eo et al. (2012) proposed a

procedure for automatic combination and co-registration of digital images and terrestrial laser data,

which used images associated with intensity and RGB values. However, this method is highly

sensitive to the size of overlapping area between scans. In their test (Eo et al. 2012), 12 scans were

collected for one corner of the building. Fusing edges extracted in 2D images and 3D point cloud

data using range images was proposed with a simple pixel corresponding mechanism (Wang et al.

2013). Their approach implies edge extraction from 2D images, but has some flaws in border

feature detection. The feature-based registration was achieved without initial alignment because

2D images are employed to aid in the recognition of feature points. However, it was too sensitive

to the size of overlapping areas in the point cloud data. In addition, a large number of scans is

needed to get a good performance result, and the feature extraction is heavily influenced by
3
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

brightness changes in the environment. Heavy computational load is an additional disadvantage

for common feature-based registration methods (Gai et al. 2013). Weinmann and Jutzi (2011)

studied an automatic image-based registration of unordered Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) data,

which used both range and reflectance information. They sorted unordered collected TLS data

automatically and registered them using the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm with camera

pose estimation. This might be applicable for construction sites; however, they performed over 10

scans of a limited space to provide sufficient overlapped area to apply the ICP algorithm and do

not consider the cases of low overlapped area between each scan. Weinmann et al. (2013) studied

automatic and accurate alignment of multiple point clouds using range imaging devices. In general,

the range imaging devices can collect only low resolution point clouds compared to lidar devices

and they also performed the experiment using miniature mockups. Therefore, it is not applicable

for large construction sites.

Tombari and Remondino (2013) reviewed the state-of-the-art techniques for automatic

registration of 3D point clouds and meshes. However, their work only tested small objects and

organized point clouds and not the whole scene of an outdoor environment. Wang et al. (2015)

studied a feature-based urban point cloud registration method using radar images with a “Lshape

detection and matching” method. However, the point cloud data from the TomoSAR are not in

high resolution so the method may work well for urban scale environments but not appropriate for

construction sites. Gong and Seibel (2016) studied a three-dimensional registration process of

multiple 3D point clouds collected from different viewpoints using machine vision. They solved

the problem of registering point clouds with repetitive geometries using a feature-based

registration algorithm and demonstrated higher accuracy compared to the ICP algorithm. However,

their experimental environment was too small compared to outdoor construction environments.
4
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

Kim et al. (2016) presented a framework to register two point clouds by using SURF feature

extraction from RGB panorama images. The experimental result was promising but it was

performed only in an indoor environment where many line-of-sight vertical and horizontal lines

and points of intersection are easily found.

Table 1. Summary of point cloud registration technology

Data Range Radar RGB


TLS TLS TLS TLS TLS
acquisition images images images
Large site
X O O X X X O X
testing
Outdoor indoor
outdoor outdoor outdoor outdoor outdoor outdoor indoor
/Indoor outdoor
Registration
F F, I T F F, I F, I F, G, I F, I
method
Overlapped
L L S L L L L L
area
Test w/ Test w/
Used Test w/
Too For Used
tailored Used tailored
miniatu tailored
Limitations & small many & small & small urban tiny
targets re
objects scans objects scale objects
objects objects
• Registration method - F: Feature-based, I: ICP-based, T: Target-based, G:
Geometrybased
• Overlapped area – L:Large, S:Small
• TLS: Terrestrial Laser Scanner

5
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

Table 1 shows that the summary of point cloud registration technologies. The purpose of

testing large sites as well as overlapped areas is to identify the challenging cases where the ICP

registration algorithm does not perform well. The overlapped area refers to the size (%) of the area

of intersection between consecutive scans. From our tests, a large site refers to the cases 1) when

the maximum range of laser scan (i.e., 80 meters) is used to cover the site area, 2) where the

distance between consecutive laser scan positions is greater than about 10 meters, and 3) the

overlapped area is less than around 89%. Under these criteria, the ICP algorithm did not perform

well based on our experimental results in Fig. 5. As shown in Table 1, the common limitations of

existing approaches are: (1) they used targets for point cloud registration; (2) they tested only small

and tailored point clouds for target objects; and (3) they scanned many times to guarantee a

sufficiently overlapped area. In addition, the automatic point clouds registration of unstructured

and scattered environments such as construction sites has not yet been successfully demonstrated

from the prior works. For these reasons, merging multi-source point information into one dataset

is still of great interest and a challenge in the construction field. Therefore, the main objective of

this study was to develop an automatic point cloud registration framework by taking relatively less

number of scans without any other manual adjustment to build a complete as-built point cloud of

the construction site.

Methodology

Achieving the requirements defined by the objective required designing a framework for the

automatic registration method. This framework consists of four steps, as shown in Fig. 1. The first

step is data acquisition using a 3D laser scanner and a digital camera, and RGB texture mapping

which merges 3D point clouds with 2D RGB images through a kinematics calculation.

6
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

The second step is initial alignment based on the extracted common features, which allows finding

correspondences in the 3D point cloud data sets by using RGB-fused point cloud data. The third

step is calculating overlapped area between each point clouds and determining the final alignment

method. The last step, final alignment, utilizes ICP or the plane matching algorithm to match the

point cloud data sets. The following sections will discuss the proposed framework, present the

experimental results, and make concluding remarks with discussions.

Data Acquisition and Fusion

The proposed method for obtaining point clouds and RGB images requires a 3D laser scanner

system with a built-in camera, which is a very common configuration in most commercial laser

scanner products. In this study, a robotic hybrid Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) system

was used which consists of four SICK 2D line laser scanners (80-meter working range at 25Hz

scan speed, 200 sec / 360º scan, 190º for vertical line) and a regular digital camera, as shown in

7
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

Fig. 2. The resolution of each line laser is 0.1667 degrees in the vertical direction and 0.072 degrees

in the horizontal direction. The digital camera captures eight pictures per 360º scan to obtain the

RGB information of the construction site. The customized 3D LiDAR system provides more

flexibility in hardware control and software programming compared to a commercial LiDAR

scanner. Multiple degree-of-freedom (DOF) kinematics problems were solved based on the built-

in mechanical information between laser scanners and a digital camera. The schematic diagram of

the kinematics solution of the equipment used in this paper is shown in Fig. 2.

The local coordinate (𝑥𝑥0, 𝑦𝑦0, 𝑧𝑧0) indicates the mobile robot’s platform coordinates

located on the ground level, and (𝑥𝑥1, 𝑦𝑦1, 𝑧𝑧1) is the origin for the laser scanner coordinate

system, which is located at the center of platform frame. The local coordinates 2 is a base frame

for distance measurement from surrounding objects fixed at the center of each laser scanner. In

8
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

addition, 𝜃𝜃1 is the body rotation angle and 𝜃𝜃2 is the angle from a laser scanner. From the

relationship among this information, the kinematics problem is solved, as shown in Eq. (1).

𝑋𝑋 cos(𝜃𝜃1) cos(𝜃𝜃2) − cos(𝜃𝜃1) sin(𝜃𝜃2)sin(𝜃𝜃1) 𝑑𝑑 cos(𝜃𝜃1) 𝑟𝑟

𝑌𝑌𝑍𝑍 = sin(sin(𝜃𝜃1) cos𝜃𝜃2)(𝜃𝜃2) − sincos((𝜃𝜃1)𝜃𝜃sin2) (𝜃𝜃2) − cos0(𝜃𝜃1) 𝑑𝑑


sinℎ(𝜃𝜃1)00

1 0 0 0 1 1
(1)
𝑟𝑟 cos(𝜃𝜃1) cos(𝜃𝜃2) + 𝑑𝑑 cos(𝜃𝜃1)
= 𝑟𝑟 sin(𝜃𝜃1) cos(𝜃𝜃2) + 𝑑𝑑 sin(𝜃𝜃1)
𝑟𝑟 sin(𝜃𝜃2) + ℎ
1

The kinematics solution corresponds to the extrinsic parameters of the digital camera, while the

intrinsic parameters, including focal length, image sensor format, and principal point, are estimated

by the pinhole camera model. The point clouds fused with RGB texture were collected as shown

in Fig. 3.

The RGB texture mapping step is mapping RGB data from a digital camera onto the 3D

point cloud data from laser scanners, which is a well-known process using the pinhole camera

model. The advantage of using the RGB texture mapping is to easily visualize the scanned area,

and to find the correspondences between 3D point cloud data and a 2D camera plane. In the

modeling process, a camera calibration step is necessary for the digital camera, which includes

finding both the internal and external parametric matrixes for the camera. The internal parametric

matrix consists of the intrinsic parameters, the focal length, image sensor format, and principal

point, which can be estimated by the pinhole camera model, while the extrinsic parameters can be

obtained through a geometric relationship based on the mounting configuration such as the height

and direction of the camera. Using these intrinsic and extrinsic parameters, the laserscanned 3D

9
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

point cloud can be transformed into 3D camera coordinates, and then finally transformed into 2D

image coordinates by Eq. (2).

𝑥𝑥 𝑢𝑢/𝑤𝑤
𝑦𝑦 = 𝑣𝑣/𝑤𝑤 ,
1 𝑤𝑤/𝑤𝑤
𝑢𝑢 𝑓𝑓𝑒𝑒 0 𝑐𝑐𝑒𝑒𝑅𝑅11𝑅𝑅12𝑅𝑅13𝑇𝑇𝑒𝑒 (2) 𝑋𝑋
𝑣𝑣 = 𝐾𝐾𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝐾𝐾𝑒𝑒𝑒𝑒𝑖𝑖 = 𝑓𝑓𝑦𝑦𝑐𝑐𝑦𝑦𝑅𝑅21𝑅𝑅22𝑅𝑅23𝑇𝑇𝑦𝑦𝑌𝑌𝑍𝑍
0 0
𝑤𝑤 0 1𝑅𝑅31𝑅𝑅23𝑅𝑅33𝑇𝑇𝑧𝑧1

10
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

11
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

In Eq. (2), 𝑋𝑋, 𝑌𝑌, 𝑍𝑍 refers to three-dimensional coordinates in the world coordinate system.

𝐾𝐾𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖𝑖 denotes the intrinsic parametric matrix and 𝐾𝐾𝑒𝑒𝑒𝑒𝑖𝑖 denotes the extrinsic parametric matrix.

The parameters fx and fy are associated with the focal length, whereas the parameters cx and cy

represent the principal point (Tsai 1987). Also, the rotation matrix R and the translation vector T

are required for transformation from the world coordinate system to camera coordinate. This

transformation is necessary since the laser-scanned 3D point cloud data is obtained in 3D world

coordinates. The camera calibration process involves finding these parameter values. In this way,

RGB texture mapping enables accurate texture matching between a point cloud and digital camera

images. Fig. 3 shows the RGB texture mapped point cloud in the construction site.

Initial Alignment with Common Feature Tracking between RGB Images

Once texture-mapped point clouds have been acquired, the next step consists of extracting

distinctive features. The feature points which are invariant to image scaling and image rotation can

be extracted by RGB images from the camera mounted on the laser scanner system and matched

between images from different scan positions. Then, the common features can be used to find the

corresponding points in the 3D point cloud by using the texture-mapped point cloud. This is

because the texture mapping process is done using the relationship between 2D image plane

position (x, y) and 3D point cloud data (X, Y, Z). Feature points are generally used for image

registration, 3D reconstruction, motion tracking, robot navigation, and object detection and

recognition. For common feature extraction, Lowe (1999) proposed the SIFT method to detect and

describe local features in images. SIFT features allow the same corner point to be uniquely

detected even if the image is scaled. The faster version of SIFT was developed by Bay et al. (2006),

known as Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF), which is also a local feature detector and
12
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

descriptor. In this study, SURF features were used to find the common features. SURF is sufficient

to get the reasonable results for the initial alignment taking into account the advantage of shorter

computation time compared to SIFT.

One of the problems when the SURF descriptor is used is identifying false common

features. There are numerous common SURF features; however not all the extracted feature points

indicate the same descriptors. Therefore, false common features should be removed from the list

of the SURF feature point matches. This study uses the Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC)

approach to find sets of consistent matching descriptors. RANSAC works by iteratively sampling

points from a given set of features and finding a set of parameters shown in Eq. (3), where (𝑥𝑥1,

𝑦𝑦1) and (𝑥𝑥2, 𝑦𝑦2) are the pixel coordinates of each image, respectively.

𝑦𝑦𝑥𝑥22 = −cossin𝜃𝜃𝜃𝜃 cossin 𝜃𝜃𝜃𝜃𝑦𝑦𝑥𝑥11 + 𝑇𝑇𝑇𝑇𝑦𝑦𝑒𝑒 (3) The

parameter 𝜃𝜃, Tx, 𝑇𝑇𝑦𝑦 are the variables used to find the best estimate by maximizing the number

of points that are considered to be within the model. The obtained optimal parameters are used to

determine the true common SURF descriptors. In this study, we select three different images for

extracting features to increase the accuracy as shown in Fig. 4.

Then, the next step is finding a transformation matrix between point clouds. One way to

estimate the transformation matrix between point clouds is to apply the Kabsch algorithm (root

mean square distance concept), which starts with two sets of paired points, P and Q, where each

set of points is represented as an N×3 matrix. The transformation matrix consists of the rotation

matrix and translation vector. The optimal rotation matrix U between point set P and Q can be

calculated by singular value decomposition (SVD) of the covariance matrix A and the translation

13
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

vector D can be obtained by calculating the difference of centroid of point sets. Therefore, the

initial alignment matrix can be obtained as shown in Eq. (4) by using matched SURF features and

its corresponding points in 3D.

𝑈𝑈11𝑈𝑈12𝑈𝑈13𝐷𝐷𝑒𝑒 𝑥𝑥 𝑥𝑥′

𝑃𝑃′ = 𝑇𝑇𝑃𝑃 = 𝑈𝑈21𝑈𝑈22𝑈𝑈23𝐷𝐷𝑦𝑦𝑦𝑦𝑧𝑧 = 𝑦𝑦′ (4)


𝑈𝑈31𝑈𝑈23𝑈𝑈33𝐷𝐷𝑧𝑧 1𝑧𝑧′

14
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

Final Alignment with ICP and Plane matching based on overlapped area

The most well-known method for point cloud registration is ICP, which was introduced by Besl

and McKay (1992), and works by iteratively finding common matching points of two point clouds

and disregarding outliers, and then minimizes the difference between them. Despite its numerous

advantages, the ICP-based methods are burdened by limitations: 1) it is not useful if the set of data

points contain many points that do not correspond with any model points; 2) it requires an initial

guess; and 3) it is computationally expensive due to the process of finding the closest point pairs.

Although there have been advances made in ICP, the basic concept of ICP algorithms is still

similar; ICP still depends heavily on the size of the overlapped area, and works accurately only if

a good pre-alignment of the point clouds already exists. This is the main reason that the initial

alignment is made based on feature matching in the previous section. The results from the previous

initial alignment provide a good a priori registration which is required for the final registration.

After the common feature-based transformation, the two point clouds are aligned closely enough

to compute the overlapped area. To calculate the overlapped area between two point clouds, k

dimensional tree and k nearest neighbor search algorithms are used, which are optimized ways of

finding the point in a given set that is closest to a given point, in the form of a proximity search.

From this result of overlapped area using nearest neighbor search, the percentage of overlapped

area can be calculated by the ratio of the area of the reference point cloud and that of the overlapped

point cloud. In this paper, the point-to-point ICP with Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) (Fantoni et al.

2012) is used as an iterative algorithm. The LM-ICP method is an iterative procedure similar to

the well-known gradient descent and Gauss-Newton algorithms, which can quickly find a local

minimum in non-linear functions.

15
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

To compare between the results of ICP and plane matching, these testbed results are

visualized as shown in Fig. 5. Fig. 5 (a) reveals the relationship between overlapped area and final

alignment results using the ICP and plane matching methods in RMSE, and Fig. 5 (b) reveals the

relationship between distance and final alignment results using the ICP and plane matching

methods in RMSE between each pair of scans respectively. The overall results between pairs of

16
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

scans are significantly improved using the plane matching method except when the overlapped

area is greater than around 89% and the distance between each pair of scans is smaller than around

10 meters. This shows that the ICP still works better than the plane matching algorithm when the

two consecutive scans have a high-overlapped area. However, the plane matching algorithm yields

better results when scans have a low-overlapped area. Therefore, the framework combines ICP

and the plane matching algorithm in the final alignment process, resulting in more robust outcomes.

Table 2. Experimental condition and results of final alignment between each pair of scans
for Testbed #1
Scan ID #1-#2 #2-#3 #3-#4 #4-#5 #5-#6 #1-#3 #2-#4 #3-#5

Overlap
93 % 91 % 90 % 88 % 89 % 82 % 85 % 82 %
Area
Distance 8m 6m 8m 10 m 9m 14 m 14 m 18 m

R ICP 0.059 m 0.034 m 0.065 m 0.082 m 0.092 m 0.225 m 0.215 m 0.238 m


M
S P-M 0.067 m 0.059 m 0.071 m 0.079 m 0.094 m 0.086 m 0.116 m 0.098 m
E

Scan ID #4-#6 #1-#4 #2-#5 #3-#6 #1-#5 #2-#6 #1-#6

Overlap
80 % 68 % 70 % 67 % 57 % 55 % 45 %
Area
Distance 19 m 24 m 24 m 27 m 34 m 32 m 43 m

R ICP 0.254 m 2.265 m 2.482 m 2.932 m 3.392 m 3.596 m 4.293 m


M
S P-M 0.106 m 0.092 m 0.128 m 0.105 m 0.095 m 0.132 m 0.118 m
E

Table 2 shows the percentage of overlapped area and distance, and the final alignment

results using ICP between each pair of scans. From the results of the ICP calculation between each

scan, the ICP algorithm performed well if the overlapped ratio between point clouds is over around

17
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

89%, as shown in Table 2. If there is a low ratio of overlapped area between the point clouds,

however, the ICP algorithm is no longer applicable. In general, construction sites are large, thus it

will require a very large number of scans in order to obtain highly overlapped scans of the whole

construction area. This is a time-consuming and very labor intensive process. Also, the large data

size incurs high computational costs when applying the ICP algorithm. To avoid this situation,

this research proposes a new plane-based algorithm for finding the final alignment if there exists

a low ratio of overlapped area while taking advantage of ICP when two scans have a sufficient

overlapped area; in our case, it was 89% or greater. As can be seen in Tables 2, the results with

ICP are better than the ones with plane-based final alignments when the threshold is defined as

89% or greater.

This new method relies on finding three plane correspondences between the point cloud to

be registered and the reference point cloud. The selected planes have to be linearly independent

and intersect at a unique point in order for the transformation parameters to be fully recovered. For

example, one of the planes can be the ground plane, whereas the second plane is a vertical wall in

the x-axis, and the third plane is a vertical wall in the y-axis. To identify the walls, the RANSAC

algorithm is used to perform plane segmentation for each point cloud as the first step. The

RANSAC algorithm works by iteratively sampling points from a given point cloud and estimating

a set of plane parameters of the form 𝑎𝑎𝑥𝑥 + 𝑏𝑏𝑦𝑦 + 𝑐𝑐𝑧𝑧 + 𝑑𝑑 = 0. The best estimate of these

parameters is determined by maximizing the number of points that are considered inliers. The

obtained plane parameters are used to segment the original point cloud into points belonging to the

plane and the remaining points. The first step for plane segmentation is to extract the planes with

the largest number of points. This process is repeated until three suitable plane candidates are found

that satisfy the linear independence criteria. Then, the proposed framework compares normal
18
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

vectors of each plane and identifies the matching planes from different scan positions. Once the

closest match between normal vectors is found, the plane correspondences between the input point

cloud and the reference point cloud are determined. Second, the rotation component R of the

transformation matrix is calculated with the plane normal vectors found in the previous step. The

rotation component is determined such that the normal vectors (𝑛𝑛1, 𝑛𝑛2, 𝑛𝑛3) in the input point

cloud are transformed in order to match the normal vectors (𝑛𝑛1, 𝑛𝑛2, 𝑛𝑛3) in the reference point

cloud. An intermediate rotation matrix that rotates a vector 𝑣𝑣1 to another vector 𝑣𝑣2 is derived

using Eq. (5).

𝑅𝑅 = 𝐼𝐼 + 𝑠𝑠𝑠𝑠𝑠𝑠𝑤𝑤(𝑣𝑣1 × 𝑣𝑣2) + 𝑠𝑠𝑠𝑠𝑠𝑠𝑤𝑤(𝑣𝑣1 × 𝑣𝑣2) ‖𝑣𝑣1 × 𝑣𝑣2‖ (5)

Three intermediate rotation matrices are calculated for each plane correspondence and then the

final rotation matrix is obtained by multiplying the intermediate rotation matrices, as in Eq. (6).

𝑅𝑅1 = 𝑔𝑔𝑠𝑠𝑔𝑔𝑅𝑅𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑎𝑎𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑛𝑛(𝑛𝑛1, 𝑛𝑛1′)

𝑅𝑅2 = 𝑔𝑔𝑠𝑠𝑔𝑔𝑅𝑅𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑎𝑎𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑛𝑛(𝑅𝑅1, 𝑛𝑛2, 𝑛𝑛2′)


(6)
𝑅𝑅3 = 𝑔𝑔𝑠𝑠𝑔𝑔𝑅𝑅𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑎𝑎𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑔𝑛𝑛(𝑅𝑅2𝑅𝑅1, 𝑛𝑛3, 𝑛𝑛3′)

𝑅𝑅 = 𝑅𝑅3𝑅𝑅2𝑅𝑅1

Third, the algorithm then matches corner points, which are defined as the unique intersection

points between three planes, between the point clouds to calculate the translation component T in

the transformation matrix. It then solves three plane equations for the (𝑥𝑥, 𝑦𝑦, 𝑧𝑧) values

simultaneously to calculate each corner point. The corresponding plane parameters are used to

formulate the plane equations as a matrix-vector multiplication operation. Once the corner point

is obtained for each point cloud, the translation vector is determined as the difference between the

19
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

positions of the two corner points. The calculations involved in this step are shown in detail in Eq.

(7).

𝑥𝑥 𝑎𝑎1 𝑏𝑏1 𝑐𝑐1 −1 −𝑑𝑑1


𝑦𝑦 = 𝑎𝑎2 𝑏𝑏2
𝑐𝑐2 −𝑑𝑑2
𝑧𝑧 𝑎𝑎3 𝑏𝑏3
𝑐𝑐3 −𝑑𝑑3
𝑥𝑥′ 𝑎𝑎1′ −1 (7)
𝑐𝑐1′ −𝑑𝑑1′
𝑦𝑦′ = 𝑎𝑎2′ 𝑏𝑏1′
𝑐𝑐2′ −𝑑𝑑2′
𝑧𝑧′ 𝑎𝑎3′ 𝑏𝑏2′
𝑏𝑏3′ 𝑐𝑐3′ −𝑑𝑑3′

𝑥𝑥 𝑥𝑥′
𝑇𝑇 = 𝑦𝑦 − 𝑦𝑦′
𝑧𝑧 𝑧𝑧′

20
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

The procedure for plane segmentation is to first extract the planes with the largest number of points.

This is because the planes detected from the different scan positions cannot match in terms of the

geometric characteristics in some cases. Therefore, only one set of three planes with the largest

number of points and one corner point for fine registration is utilized in this study. Finally, a

registered version of the input point cloud is obtained after the rotation and translation operations

are applied to each point in the point cloud. Fig. 6 demonstrates the three segmented planes and

21
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

the intersection corner point from the coarse transformed point cloud. The point located at the left

in Fig. 6 indicates the corner point, which lies at the intersection of the three identified planes.

Results

The data acquisition process for validating the proposed framework was performed on the Georgia

Tech campus. The first testbed was performed on a construction site with six different scan

positions. Fig. 7 illustrates the sequence for point cloud registration, and Table 3 represents the

results of the proposed framework. Fig. 7(d) shows the final registered point clouds with six

different scan positions marked with circles. To verify the result for this testbed, the higher scan

ID was assumed as a ground truth, and the deviation angle from each reference axis in degree and

root mean square error (RMSE) in meter are measured at each step of the proposed framework. As

shown in Table 2, the ICP algorithm does not work between scan ID#1 and #4. Also, it generates

the worst result between scan ID# 4 and #6. Therefore, scan IDs #1, #4, and #6, which are not

applicable point cloud data sets for the ICP algorithm, are selected to apply the plane matching

algorithm. From Table 3, it can be observed that the initial alignment using common feature

extraction is effective in obtaining a coarse estimate for registration. The measured RMSE after

the initial alignment ranges from 1 meter to 2 meters, and the deviation angle ranges between 1 o

and 10o. After the final alignment process, the RMSE is reduced to around 0.2 meters and the

deviation angle to less than 0.35o.

Table 3. Deviation angles (degree) and RMSE (m) of each registration process with plane
matching for Testbed #1
Registration scan ID #1 - #4 #4 - #6
Overlapped Area 68 % 80 %
Distance 24 m 19 m

22
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

Registration process Original Initial Final Original Initial Final


Deviation X axis -15.334o -5.823o -0.232o 9.141o 3.232o 0.217o
angle Y axis 3.922o -1.402o 0.226o -13.922o 2.362o -0.152o
(degree) Z axis 168.125o 10.276o 0.289o 91.421o 6.726o 0.348o
RMSE (m) - 2.214 m 0.092 m - 2.656 m 0.106 m

Table 4. Deviation angles (degree) and RMSE (m) with plane matching for Testbed #2
Registration scan ID #7 - #8 #8 - #9
Overlapped Area 70 % 56 %
Distance 26 m 37 m
Registration process Original Initial Final Original Initial Final
Deviation X axis 11.239o -1.325o -0.342o -8.382o -1.492o -0.129o
angle Y axis -1.928o -0.823o -0.192o -3.321o 0.592o -0.251o
(degree) Z axis -78.836o 12.324o 0.427o 50.329o 4.324o 0.332o
RMSE (m) - 3.012 m 0.095 m - 2.529 m 0.088 m

The second testbed was performed near a target building with three different scan

positions. Fig. 8 illustrates the result of point cloud registration by using the proposed framework.

In Table 4, the percentages of overlapped area for all of the scans were below 89% after initial

alignment where the ICP algorithm did not perform well. Also, it can be observed that the

measured RMSE after the final alignment is under 0.25 meters, and deviation angle is less than

0.34o

23
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

The third testbed was performed in an indoor environment, shown in Fig. 9. The purpose of this

testbed was to evaluate the proposed algorithm under different conditions and verify that the
24
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

method of finding three planes and one corner point is still viable. Similarly, the registration

process was carried out between two scan positions using the proposed method of obtaining an

initial alignment with visual feature points and a final alignment matching planes and a corner

point. From Table 5, it can be observed that the measured RMSE after the final alignment is under

0.1 meters, and deviation angle is less than 0.13o.

Table 6 shows the information about which scans are used for automatic registration and its final

results. The six sets of laser scan data were taken for Testbed #1 to compare the proposed method

over the ICP based method. Among the six sets of laser scan data, the proposed method only used

three sets of scan data (#1, #4, and #6) for automatic registration while the ICP-based approach

25
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

required all six sets of scan data. Therefore, the proposed framework can reduce the number of

scans required. For Testbed #2, all pairs of scans have a low-overlapped area where ICP cannot be

applied; thus, the plane matching method was applied.

Table 5. Deviation angles (degree) and RMSE (m) with plane matching for Testbed #3
Registration scan ID #10 - #11
Overlapped Area 96 %
Distance 3m
Registration process Original Initial Alignment Final Alignment
Deviation X axis -17.404o -7.188o 0.092o
angle Y axis -3.155o -1.702o 0.049o
(degree) Z axis 29.899o 9.430o -0.127o
RMSE (m) - - 0.047 m

Table 6. Final result of automatic registration for all Testbeds


Testbed ID Testbed #1 Testbed #2 Testbed #3
Registration Scan ID #1 - #4 - #6 #7 - #8 - #9 #10 - #11
Deviation X axis -0.015 o -0.213 o 0.092o
angle Y axis 0.074 o 0.059 o 0.049o
(degree) Z axis 0.637 o 0.095 o -0.127o
RMSE (m) 0.198 m 0.183 m 0.047 m

Discussion and Conclusion

A robust method for automatic point cloud registration without using marked targets was

introduced and validated with empirical construction site data. A laser scanning system with a

digital camera was used to obtain point clouds with mapped RGB texture data. The proposed

framework consists of four steps. The first step includes data acquisition of point cloud and RGB

26
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

images, and data fusion by using kinematic solution. The second step involves obtaining an initial

alignment by extracting common features from digital images and finding their corresponding 3D

positions in point clouds. The third step calculates an overlapped area between scans and

determines the final alignment method between ICP and the plane matching algorithm. Lastly, the

final accurate alignment is achieved by using the result from the previous step. The main advantage

of this framework is to obtain automatic point cloud registration even there is low overlapped area

between scans where the ICP algorithm does not perform well. Also, it can be extended to any

type of laser scanner which has a built-in digital camera from which a kinematic relationship

between the collected 3D point cloud data and the captured RGB images can be estimated.

The limitation of the proposed framework is that it requires three planes with one

intersection point on the overlapped area. In general, however, construction sites contain many

planes throughout the construction process such as foundations, materials, temporary structures,

and job trailers. Therefore, this proposed framework is reasonably applicable to construction sites

as validated in this study. Furthermore, many planes are easily found in an indoor environment,

thus the proposed method works well indoors as well. In summary, the main contributions of this

study to the existing knowledge of automatic registration of point clouds are: (1) the proposed

framework is applicable when the data is collected from a large and complex environment; (2) it

performs well with a low overlapped area between scans; and (3) it takes a smaller number of scans

to reconstruct a large site, thus reducing time, cost and computational burden.

27
Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
Environments." ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering,Volume 32, March 2018 .DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-
5487.0000720.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (Award #: CMMI-

1358176). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed on this material

are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

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Kim, P., Chen, J., and Cho, Y. (2017). "Automated Point Clouds Registration using Visual and Planar Features for Construction
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