An automatic procedure for co-registration of terrestrial laser scanners and digital cameras

Driven by progress in sensor technology, algorithms and data processing capabilities, close range photogrammetry has found a wide range of new application fields over the past two decades. Particularly, the emergence of terrestrial laser scanner has contributed to the close range photogrammetry “popularization” through many promising new applications. Nevertheless, a central issue in many of these developments is the integration of sensor technology with reliable data processing schemes to generate highly automated photogrammetric measurements systems.This paper presents a flexible approach for the automatic co-registration of terrestrial laser scanners (TLS) and amateur digital cameras (DC) to be used effectively in practice. Particularly, the developed approach deals with two different images: a camera image acquired with a DC and a range image obtained with a TLS. To this end, an open-source tool “USAlign” has been developed for testing the different experiments.