A study of projections for key point based registration of panoramic terrestrial 3D laser scan

This paper surveys state-of-the-art image features and descriptors for the task of 3D scan registration based on panoramic reflectance images.As modern terrestrial laser scanners digitize their environment in a spherical way,the sphere has to be projected to a two-dimensional image.To this end,we evaluate the equirectangular,the cylindrical,the Mercator,the rectilinear,the Pannini,the stereographic,and the z-axis projection.We show that the Mercator and the Pannini projection outperform the other projection methods.