Color supported generalized-ICP

This paper presents a method to support point cloud registration with color information. For this purpose we integrate L*a*b* color space information into the Generalized Iterative Closest Point (GICP) algorithm, a state-of-the-art Plane-To-Plane ICP variant. A six-dimensional k-d tree based nearest neighbor search is used to match corresponding points between the clouds. We demonstrate that the additional effort in general does not have an immoderate impact on the runtime, since the number of iterations can be reduced. The influence on the estimated 6 DoF transformations is quantitatively evaluated on six different datasets. It will be shown that the modified algorithm can improve the results without needing any special parameter adjustment.