Finding the Best TLS Point Cloud Registration Algorithm for Long-Range Geomonitoring

Accurate registration of TLS (Terrestrial Laser Scanner) point clouds is essential for unbiased determination of deformations in long-range geomonitoring. We evaluated the performance of several established registration methods in an ongoing geomonitoring case study. Our results showed that the ICP (Iterative Closest Point)-based methods specifically developed with geomonitoring in mind perform the best. However, when dealing with distortions in point clouds, the newly developed stripe-wise non-rigid transformation based on the F2S3 (feature to feature supervoxel-based spatial smoothing) algorithm outperformed all established methods