Laser scanning

The measurement of objects by terrestrial laser scanning originates point clouds with several million points whose co-ordinates refer to the scanner center. One of the first steps of the project treatment is the registration of the scans. The objective of the registration process is the determination of parameters for the transformation of each single scan in a common co-ordinate system (datum).

Conventional registration programs use the information of identical points in adjacent scans. The marking of these points is usually realized by targets like marks or spheres. However, this procedure of registration using identical points has several disadvantages.

Our software product Scantra uses an absolutely new approach. Not targets are used, but planes which have previously been detected separately in each scan.

The advantages of the Scantra method from the first sight:

• Considerable acceleration of the measurement on site by discontinuation of targets
• Entire exploitation of the redundancy of overlapping Scans for the registration
• Avoidance of extrapolation effects (misalignments in the overlapping range)
• Neighborhood accuracy in the range of sub-millimeters