Analyzing LiDAR scan skewing and its impact on scan matching

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic study of the scan skewing problem. Scan skewing is the non-rigid deformation of point clouds acquired by LiDAR's and is the result of their sequential scanning nature. We theoretically analyze the impact of skewing on scan matching and subsequently quantify the impact using synthetic LiDAR data with controlled skew distortions. We also show how the Geometric-Algebra LMS, an iterative point set registration filter, can be tuned to incorporate skewing aware weights to reduce the impact of skewing on scan matching. Results with real 3D LiDAR data are also presented.