An automatic technique for registering airborne and terrestrial LiDAR data

Data registration is a prerequisite in the integration of multi-platform LiDAR for various applications. A new approach is proposed for automatic registration of airborne LiDAR data and terrestrial LiDAR data, by synthetically using building boundaries and corners. Building boundaries and corners are firstly extracted from terrestrial and airborne LiDAR data with existing methods; a strategy using corner matching with boundary constraints is then proposed, which is the key idea of this approach. The building corners extracted from airborne LiDAR data and the building corners extracted from terrestrial LiDAR data are reliably matched during an iterative processing in a fully automatic way by taking the distances between airborne boundaries and terrestrial boundaries as constraints. The proposed approach provides both high reliability and high geometric accuracy in the final registration of airborne and terrestrial LiDAR data.