Co-registration of Surfaces by 3D Least Squares Matching

A method for the automatic co-registration of 3D surfaces is presented. Die method utilizes the mathematical model of Least Squares 2D image matching and extends it for solving the 3D surface matching problem The transformation parameters of the search surfaces are estimated with respect to a template surface. The solution is achieved when the sum of the squares of the 3D Spatial (Euclidean) distances between the surfaces are minimized. The parameter estimation is achieved using the Generalized Gauss-Markov model. Execution level implementation details are given. Apart from the co-registration of the point clouds generated from spacaborne airborne and terrestinal sensors and techniques. the proposed method is also useful for change detection, 3D comparison, and quality assessment tasks Experiments, terrain data examples show file capabilities of the method