Fast Point Cloud Fusion

Ronny Hänsch¹       Thomas Weber²

¹Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
²Carmeq GmbH, Berlin, Germany

Automatic registration of unordered point clouds acquired by Kinect sensors using an overlap heuristic, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 2015

Abstract

This work implements a pipeline to automatically register point clouds captured by depth sensors like the Microsoft Kinect. The method neither makes assumptions about the view order of the sensors, nor uses any kind of other task-dependent prior knowledge. All point clouds within the input set are aligned in a common, global coordinate system by a successive application of pairwise registration steps. The order of the individual transformations is automatically derived from a global point cloud graph, which uses the overlap of two individual point clouds to establish a weighted link between them. The experiments prove the generality of the proposed approach by applying it to data from a single but moving sensor, multiple Kinects that run simultaneously, as well as laser scanning data. The obtained accuracies in terms of the mean nearest point neighbour distance are below 0.01% of the maximum point distance of the reference data in all cases.

Code

FPCF - Fast Point Cloud Fusion
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The FPCF framework is a able to perform an automatic registration of an unorganised point cloud set.

The required external dependencies are located in the "dependencies" directory.
Additional documentation with compile instructions are located in the "doc" directory.
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The framework was tested using Windows 8 64-Bit, Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, and libraries with the following version number.:
- CMake ( http://www.cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html )
- Boost 1.53 ( http://www.boost.org/ )
- Eigen 3.0.5 ( http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/index.php )
- Flann 1.8.4 ( http://www.cs.ubc.ca/research/flann/#download )
- PCL 1.7 ( http://www.cs.ubc.ca/research/flann/ )
- Qhull 2012.1 (http://www.qhull.org/ )
- VTK 5.10.1 (http://www.vtk.org/ )
- Qt 4.8.0 ( http://qt-project.org/ )

Code