US Patent 11049267 Apparatus, method, and system for alignment of 3D datasets

The present invention lies in the field of 3D surveying, mapping, and imaging. In particular, the present invention relates to the rotational alignment of 3D datasets. Embodiments include an apparatus method and program for rotational and optionally also translational alignment of 3D datasets. The 3D datasets being stored as point clouds, transformed into vector sets, and the vector sets being represented as a unit sphere or Gaussian sphere and compared for best alignment. The found best alignment is used to rotate the two 3D datasets into rotational and translational alignment with one another.