This unique work presents a detailed review of the processing and analysis of 3D point clouds. A fully automated framework is introduced, incorporating each aspect of a typical end-to-end processing workflow, from raw 3D point cloud data to semantic objects in the scene. For each of these components, the book describes the theoretical background, and compares the performance of the proposed approaches to that of current state-of-the-art techniques. Topics and features: reviews techniques for the acquisition of 3D point cloud data and for point quality assessment; explains the fundamental concepts for extracting features from 2D imagery and 3D point cloud data; proposes an original approach to keypoint-based point cloud registration; discusses the enrichment of 3D point clouds by additional information acquired with a thermal camera, and describes a new method for thermal 3D mapping; presents a novel framework for 3D scene analysis.
