COMPARISON with ACCURACY of TERRESTRIAL LASER SCANNER by USING POINT CLOUD ALIGNED with SHAPE MATCHING and BEST FITTING METHODS

Recently operation systems of laser scanning have been obviously improved; for instance shape matching has been equipped with software on a post processing stage so measurement without any targets is a prerequisite condition of field surveying with laser scanners. Moreover a shape matching method enables us to easily register a pair of point clouds with some errors even if those data are scanned by several type scanners. Those slightly errors can influence accuracy of alignments if the object is large to require a lot of scans. Laser scanning data has random errors and accuracy of alignments can be improved by matching error distributions of pairs of point clouds to natural distributions. This method is called "best fitting" in contrast "shape matching" in a software, PolyWorks |Inspector. In this paper, accuracy of alignments between shape matching and best fitting is discussed. The scan data of three phaseshift laser scanners (FARO Focus 3D MS120, FARO Focus 3D X330 and Z+F Imager 5016) and two time-of-flight scanners (Leica BLK 360 and Leica Scan station C5) are used for analyses. Accuracy of alignments by using shape matching and best fitting methods is demonstrated by showing points of scan data with histograms of error distributions.