A novel coarse-to-fine registration approach for aligning partially overlapped 3D scanned data

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper proposes a novel method for register partially overlapped three-dimensional (3D) point sets when a complete 3D scanned model is constructed from partially scanned 3D point sets. 3D point sets are the most primitive and fundamental surface representations. 3D acquisition devices such as laser scanners and range image finders are popular sources for acquiring point clouds. With the availability of low cost and highly efficient 3D laser scanners, the popularity of such devices is increasing rapidly in various fields. Generally, a standard scanner can obtain only a partial data to build a complete 3D model of the object. These partially scanned 3D patches need to be aligned together in the same coordinate system to construct a complete 3D model, and this process is widely known as registration. A coarse-to-fine alignment technique is proposed to register two partially overlapped point sets. First, the overlapping regions using a novel sampling strategy are identified and the overlapping regions of two point sets are aligned together. Second, fine registration is carried out, in which an auxiliary pair and surface normal constraints are used to find reliable corresponding points in order to achieve higher accuracy.