Image-Based Alignment of 3D Scans
This addresses a specific challenge in 3D scanning workflows for applications like digitization or inspection, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing scanning and feature matching techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of aligning 3D scans of an object in different poses after repositioning, which loses correspondence, by proposing a fully automatic method that matches 2D features between images and uses image-point cloud correspondence, demonstrating results on three dissimilar objects.
Full 3D scanning can efficiently be obtained using structured light scanning combined with a rotation stage. In this setting it is, however, necessary to reposition the object and scan it in different poses in order to cover the entire object. In this case, correspondence between the scans is lost, since the object was moved. In this paper, we propose a fully automatic method for aligning the scans of an object in two different poses. This is done by matching 2D features between images from two poses and utilizing correspondence between the images and the scanned point clouds. To demonstrate the approach, we present the results of scanning three dissimilar objects.