Registration of Optical Images with Lidar Data and Its Accuracy Assessment

Photogrammetry and lidar are two technologies complementary for 3D reconstruction. However, the problem is that the current registration methods of optical images with lidar data cannot satisfy all the requirements for the fusion of the above two technologies, especially for close-range photogrammetry and terrestrial lidar. In this paper, we propose a novel method for registration of optical images with terrestrial lidar data, which is implemented by minimizing the distances from the photogrammetric matching points to terrestrial lidar data surface, with the collinearity equation as the basic mathematical model. One advantage of this method is that it requires no feature extraction and segmentation from the lidar data. Another advantage is that non-rigid deformation caused by lens distortion can be eliminated through the use of bundle adjustment similar to self-calibration. In addition, experiments with two different data sets show that this method cannot only eliminate the influence of certain gross errors, but also offer a high accuracy of 3 mm to 5 mm. Therefore, the proposed registration method is proved to be more effective, accurate, and reliable.