An Improvement in the Identification of the Centres of Checkerboard Targets in Point Clouds Using Terrestrial Laser Scanning

Measurement using terrestrial laser scanning is performed at several stations to measure an entire object. In order to obtain a complete and uniform point cloud, it is necessary to register each and every scan in one local or global coordinate system. One registration method is based on reference points—in this case, checkerboard targets. The aim of this research was to analyse the accuracy of checkerboard target identification and propose an algorithm to improve the accuracy of target centre identification, particularly for low-resolution and low-quality point clouds. The proposed solution is based on the geometric determination of the target centre. This work presents an outline of a new approach, designed by the author, to discuss the influence of the point cloud parameters on the process of checkerboard centre identification and to propose an improvement in target centre identification. The validation of the proposed solutions reveals that the difference between the typical automatic target identification and the proposed method amounts to a maximum of 6 mm for scans of different qualities. The proposed method may serve as an alternative to, or supplement for, checkerboard identification, particularly when the quality of these scans is not sufficient for automatic algorithms.