Towards Efficient Indoor/Outdoor Registration Using Planar Polygons

The registration of indoor and outdoor scans with a precision reaching the level of geometric noise represents a major challenge for Indoor/Outdoor building modeling. The basic idea of the contribution presented in this paper consists in extracting planar polygons from indoor and outdoor LiDAR scans, and then matching them. In order to cope with the very small overlap between indoor and outdoor scans of the same building, we propose to start by extracting points lying in the buildings’ interior from the outdoor scans as points where the laser ray crosses detected façades. Since, within a building environment, most of the objects are bounded by a planar surface, we propose a new registration algorithm that matches planar polygons by clustering polygons according to their normal direction, then by their offset in the normal direction. We use this clustering to find possible polygon correspondences (hypotheses) and estimate the optimal transformation for each hypothesis. Finally, a quality criteria is computed for each hypothesis in order to select the best one. To demonstrate the accuracy of our algorithm, we tested it on real data with a static indoor acquisition and a dynamic (Mobile Laser Scanning) outdoor acquisition.