Pairwise Registration Algorithm for Large-Scale Planar Point Cloud Used in Flatness Measurement

In this paper, an optimized three-dimensional (3D) pairwise point cloud registration algorithm is proposed, which is used for flatness measurement based on a laser profilometer. The objective is to achieve a fast and accurate six-degrees-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose estimation of a large-scale planar point cloud to ensure that the flatness measurement is precise. To that end, the proposed algorithm extracts the boundary of the point cloud to obtain more effective feature descriptors of the keypoints. Then, it eliminates the invalid keypoints by neighborhood evaluation to obtain the initial matching point pairs. Thereafter, clustering combined with the geometric consistency constraints of correspondences is conducted to realize coarse registration. Finally, the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm is used to complete fine registration based on the boundary point cloud. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is superior to the current algorithms in terms of boundary extraction and registration performance.