A general mathematical model of least squares three-dimensional surface matching is proposed based on minimizing the sum of squares of the Euclidean distances between the overlapped surfaces.The least squares adjustment model of our proposed method is discussed in detail.We explain how these methods can be used for the co-registration of the real airborne laser scanner data.Concluding results of our experiment suggest that our proposed model has a good performance for transformation parameters estimation in three-dimensional surface matching procedure

and it can meet the application of strip adjustment for airborne laser scanner data.Our proposed method

which can be implemented with many conjugate points rules

is a real general mathematical model for least squares three-dimensional surface matching.