An algorithm for rough alignment of point clouds in three-dimensional space

Registration of 3D point clouds consists of two steps: preliminary coarse registration and precise registration. A typical algorithm for the precise registration is the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm. To obtain a suitable registration result for point clouds with quite different initial positions, a rough registration algorithm should also be used. In this presentation, we propose a geometric rough registration algorithm. For two given point clouds with arbitrary initial positions, an approximation of the orthogonal transformation between the clouds is suggested. Computer simulation results are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.