How to merge two point clouds with different view points

Question

My 3D Scanner scans some object from different angles to get a 360° surface reconstruction in the end. The point clouds of each scan have different amounts of points and need to be merged. In the PCL library, that I would like to use for the reconstruction, there are algorithms for merging point clouds with the same amount of points, using some iterative closest point method.

I would like to avoid finding out the axis of the rotation. Of course, knowing it's position and the angle of the rotation, I could just multiply all my points of one cloud with the rotation matrix and then merge the clouds. Is there any way to merge them without knowing the center of rotation? (And maybe even get it's position out of the algorithm?)

Answer 1

Well, it seems an old question, just may be help to other people :) It won't make sense if you merge the point clouds without registration. Thus ICP should be employed. Then you can perform transformation to the corresponding Point Cloud, and merge them after that. Should be straight forward.