In the fields of industrial design, artistic design and heritage conservation, physical objects are usually digitalized by reverse engineering through some 3D scanning methods. Laser scan and photogrammetry are two main methods to be used. For laser scan, a video camera and a laser source are necessary, and for photogrammetry, a digital still camera with high resolution pixels is indispensable. In some 3D modeling tasks, two methods are often integrated to get satisfactory results. Although many research works have been done on how to combine the results of the two methods, no work has been reported to design an integrated device at low cost. In this paper, a new 3D scan system combining laser scan and photogrammetry using a single consumer digital camera is proposed. Nowadays there are many consumer digital cameras, such as Canon EOS 5D Mark II, they usually have features of more than 10M pixels still photo recording and full 1080p HD movie recording, so a integrated scan system can be designed using such a camera. A square plate glued with coded marks is used to place the 3d objects, and two straight wood rulers also glued with coded marks can be laid on the plate freely. In the photogrammetry module, the coded marks on the plate make up a world coordinate and can be used as control network to calibrate the camera, and the planes of two rulers can also be determined. The feature points of the object and the rough volume representation from the silhouettes can be obtained in this module. In the laser scan module, a hand-held line laser is used to scan the object, and the two straight rulers are used as reference planes to determine the position of the laser. The laser scan results in dense points cloud which can be aligned together automatically through calibrated camera parameters. The final complete digital model is obtained through a new a patchwise energy functional method by fusion of the feature points, rough volume and the dense points cloud. The design details are introduced, and a toy cock is used to test the new method, and the test results proof the validity of the new method.

Date Published: 6 August 2009
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 7384, International Symposium on Photoelectronic Detection and Imaging 2009: Advances in Imaging Detectors and Applications, 738420 (6 August 2009); doi: 10.1117/12.835748

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7384:
International Symposium on Photoelectronic Detection and Imaging 2009: Advances in Imaging Detectors and Applications
Kun Zhang; Xiang-jun Wang; Guang-jun Zhang; Ke-cong Ai, Editor(s)