Complete Scene Reconstruction by Merging Images and Laser Scans
This addresses the challenge of reconstructing complex architectural scenes with low-texture areas for applications in cultural heritage preservation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing SfM and scanning techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of generating complete architectural scene reconstructions by combining images and laser scans, achieving accurate calibration and registration through a three-step pipeline that automatically plans scanning locations based on SfM results. Experimental evaluations on two ancient Chinese architecture datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.
Image based modeling and laser scanning are two commonly used approaches in large-scale architectural scene reconstruction nowadays. In order to generate a complete scene reconstruction, an effective way is to completely cover the scene using ground and aerial images, supplemented by laser scanning on certain regions with low texture and complicated structure. Thus, the key issue is to accurately calibrate cameras and register laser scans in a unified framework. To this end, we proposed a three-step pipeline for complete scene reconstruction by merging images and laser scans. First, images are captured around the architecture in a multi-view and multi-scale way and are feed into a structure-from-motion (SfM) pipeline to generate SfM points. Then, based on the SfM result, the laser scanning locations are automatically planned by considering textural richness, structural complexity of the scene and spatial layout of the laser scans. Finally, the images and laser scans are accurately merged in a coarse-to-fine manner. Experimental evaluations on two ancient Chinese architecture datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed complete scene reconstruction pipeline.