Tessellation of Ground-Based LIDAR Data for ICP Registration

A technique to improve the positional accuracy of mobile ground-based LIDAR systems is proposed. Terrapointpsilas TITAN(TM) system scans the same objects at different times, so by aligning scans, any drift over time can be estimated. This paper describes a simple way of tessellating the scanned data into segments based on the vehiclepsilas path. Principal Components Analysis is then used to estimate how well pairs of segments will align when registered with an Iterative Closest Point algorithm. The results show that this analysis does indeed find segments which are likely to register well. Finally a more formal method to analyze the results is proposed, to better determine the quality of the registration so that it can be used to improve the position estimate for the LIDAR system.