CloudCompare forum

Hi,

I need to align 2 points cloud. On complex environments, registration tool is not enough accurate for automatic alignment. Manual alignment (translate/rotate tool) is better. Do you have a solution where we could selected plane areas on both of point cloud and run ICP algorithm on theses selected areas instead of all point cloud? Align tool could be use only with points selected on both of point cloud but it's not enough for me because we don't have any control points.

Regards,

Sylvain Gautier

Point-pair based alignment should always be used, at least to roughly initialize the registration. If it is well done, this enables to use the automatic registration with a very low 'overlap' parameter (which is good when dealing with complex / noisy clouds).

If you are able to isolate some 'planes' (well, hopefully several planes with various orientations, otherwise the automatic registration won't be properly constrained) with the scissors tool, then you can run the registration on the corresponding subsets of points. CC will output the registration matrix in the console (and also in the 'Transformation history' of the subset cloud). You can copy this matrix and apply it on the original cloud (with 'Edit > Apply transformation').