Registration of images to unorganized 3D point clouds using contour cues

Abstract

Low resolution commercial 3D sensors contribute to computer vision tasks even better when the analysis is carried out in a combination with higher resolution image data. This requires registration of 2D images to unorganized 3D point clouds. In this paper we present a framework for 2D-3D data fusion to obtain directly the camera pose of a 2D color image in relation to a 3D point cloud. It includes a novel multiscale intensity feature detection algorithm and a modified ICP procedure based on point-to-line distances. The framework is generic for several data types (such as CAD designs or LiDAR data without photometric information), and results show that performance is comparable to the state of the art, while avoiding manual markers or specific patterns on the data.