Automatic Registration Between Low-Altitude LiDAR Point Clouds and Aerial Images Using Road Features

Among the many means of acquiring surface information, low-altitude light detection and ranging (LiDAR) systems (e.g., unmanned aerial vehicle LiDAR, UAV-LiDAR) have become an important approach to accessing geospatial information. Considering the lower level of hardware technology in low-altitude LiDAR systems compared to that in airborne LiDAR, and the greater flexibility in-flight, registration procedures must be first performed to facilitate the fusion of laser point data and aerial images. The corner points and edges of buildings are frequently used for the automatic registration of aerial imagery with LiDAR data. Although aerial images and LiDAR data provide powerful support for building detection, adaptive edge detection for all types of building shapes is difficult. To deal with the weakness of building edge detection and reduce matching-related computation, the study presents a novel automatic registration method for aerial images, with LiDAR data, on the basis of main-road information in urban areas. Firstly, vector road centerlines are extracted from raw LiDAR data and then projected onto related aerial images with the use of coarse exterior orientation parameters (EOPs). Secondly, the corresponding image road features of each LiDAR vector road are determined using an improved total rectangle-matching approach. Finally, the endpoints of the conjugate road features obtained from the LiDAR data and aerial images are used as ground control points in space resection adjustment to refine the EOPs; an iterative strategy is used to obtain optimal matching results. Experimental results using road features verify the feasibility, robustness and accuracy of the proposed approach.