With the increasing popularity of RGB-depth (RGB-D) sensor, research on the use of RGB-D sensors to reconstruct three-dimensional (3D) indoor scenes has gained more and more attention. In this paper, an automatic point cloud registration algorithm is proposed to efficiently handle the task of 3D indoor scene reconstruction using pan-tilt platforms on a fixed position. The proposed algorithm aims to align multiple point clouds using extrinsic parameters of the RGB-D camera obtained from every preset pan-tilt control point. A computationally efficient global registration method is proposed based on transformation matrices formed by the offline calibrated extrinsic parameters. Then, a local registration method, which is an optional operation in the proposed algorithm, is employed to refine the preliminary alignment result. Experimental results validate the quality and computational efficiency of the proposed point cloud alignment algorithm by comparing it with two state-of-the-art methods.
