Complex-surface 360° panoramic measurement using mirror-assisted multiview 3D laser scanning system

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a low-cost, easy-to-implement yet robust panoramic 3D profile reconstruction system, including two plane mirrors and a conventional 3D triangulation laser scanner (TLS), for full-surface reconstruction and reverse molding of complex samples. With the help of two plane mirrors, the TLS can simultaneously capture the laser line patterns from three perspectives (i.e., two virtual perspectives in the plane mirrors and one real perspective), thus enabling 3D reconstructions of the front surface and two rear surfaces of the sample. After precise calibration of the plane mirrors, the sample surfaces reconstructed from three different perspectives can be transformed into a common global coordinate, thus achieving a straightforward 360-deg full-surface profile reconstruction. Real experiments were performed to verify the proposed method, including panoramic profile reconstruction of the standard sphere, complex-shaped surfaces and shiny surfaces, in which the reconstruction deviation of the standard sphere was only 0.4293% and RMSE was 94.595 μm. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can perform accurate 3D reconstruction of samples with complex surfaces and different materials, providing a cost-effective strategy for achieving panoramic 3D profile measurements.