3D laser scanning is gaining applications increasingly in many fields. Scan registration is needed for combining scan data taken from different scanner locations. For this purpose, a global reference system is required. In this paper a newly designed 2D chessboard-like target is introduced, which can be printed on paper with a standard black-and-white printer and used as reference object for the registration. Additionally, each target has a bar-coded area containing its identity. Such a target, even under affine distortion and small rotation, can be automatically recognized using image processing techniques. The correspondence between identical targets in different scans can be determined automatically by a bar code reading algorithm. A set of methods and algorithms are demonstrated for the target recognition and information extraction including a newly developed recursive algorithm for contour follow­ing. Further research is done for the recognition of chessboard targets with arbitrary rotation.