Stereo-based registration of multi-sensor imagery for enhanced visualization of remote environments

Projective multi-sensor imagery and range data can be integrated to create visually coherent scene models via texture mapping if they can be properly registered before display. Presented in the paper is a novel stereo-based method for registering color and LIDAR images acquired from externally uncalibrated sensors for use in a such a visualization system. In the registration approach presented, corresponding features are extracted from LIDAR intensity/color image pairs and employed by a novel registration algorithm which recovers the relative pose between the two sensors by minimizing the difference between stereo and LIDAR estimated ranges