Flying laser range finder and its data registration algorithm

Scanning from the air is one of the most efficient methods for obtaining 3D data of large-scale objects. For this purpose, we have been developing a Flying Laser Range Finder that is suspended under a balloon. Even though the scanning speed of the finder is quite rapid, it is difficult to eliminate the influence of the swing of a balloon. As a result the scanned data have some distortion due to the intra-scanning movement. In order to compensate this intra-scanning movement, we propose a evolutional registration algorithm which not only aligns multiple range images to determining inter-scanning movement parameters, but also rectifies distortion of range image by determining intra-scanning movement parameters. In this paper, we describe our aerial scanning system especially focussing on the design of the Flying Laser Range Finder and deformation registration algorithm. To show the effectiveness of our method, we evaluate its performance using synthesized and real data.