Accurate and robust registration of high-speed railway viaduct point clouds using closing conditions and external geometric constraints

This paper proposes an automatic method for registering multiple laser scans without a control network. The proposed registration method first uses artificial targets to pair-wise register adjacent scans for initial transformation estimates; the proposed registration method then employs combined adjustments with closing conditions and external triangle constraints to globally register all scans along a long-range, high-speed railway corridor. The proposed registration method uses (1) closing conditions to eliminate registration errors that gradually accumulate as the length of a corridor (the number of scan stations) increases, and (2) external geometric constraints to ensure the shape correctness of an elongated high-speed railway. A 640-m high-speed railway viaduct with twenty-one piers is used to conduct experiments using our proposed registration method. A group of comparative experiments is undertaken to evaluate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed registration method to accurately register long-range corridors.