Alignment of Point Clouds for Comparison of Infrastructures in Civil Engineering on Quality Control in Metrology

For 3D point cloud registration, Go-ICP [Yang et al., 2016] has been shown to obtain the global optimal solution for a pair composed of a model point cloud and a data point cloud. Go-ICP mostly has been investigated only on standard sets of point clouds. In this paper, we demonstrate the remarkable efficacy of Go-ICP for the alignment of very complex large-scale point clouds to their corresponding deformed CAD models. In particular, given two distinct sets of point clouds taken from the exterior and the interior of a building, experiments demonstrate that Go-ICP is able to successfully align both of these sets to the point cloud of the CAD model of the whole building (both exterior and interior information included). With the experimentation presented in this paper, we demonstrate that Go-ICP can achieve excellent alignment results and that this approach can be deployed in applications aiming at comparing CAD models of a building ("as designed" model) to the point cloud of the actual building ("as-built" model). Experiments also demonstrate the efficacy of Go-ICP to align a deformed copy of a man-made object to the original object in quality control applications.