Fast and Accurate 3D Reconstruction of Dental Models

Abstract

There are three main processes in 3D reconstruction: point cloud generation, point cloud registration, and point cloud merging. A merging algorithm is necessary to fuse range images obtained from multiple directions in order to achieve a complete model of a single surface. In merging phase, most low cost RGB-d sensors use volumetric range image processing (VRIP) to fuse 3D data in realtime. However, VRIP isn’t suitable for 3D measurement of dental models because the quality of 3D data from its low resolution depth image cannot satisfy high precision of dental CAD systems. To achieve greater details, We suggest to introduce a new idea, so-called angle truncation, into VRIP to fuse 3D data quickly and retain fine details simultaneously. We also discuss various distance metric and blending functions in scanning dental impressions. Finally, dental impression model is scanned to compare the accuracy and the speed of our method, the original VRIP, and Poisson surface reconstruction which is often preferred in 3d reconstruction. The results show that the method’s accuracy is improved to the original VRIP and the time efficiency is enhanced compared to the Poisson surface reconstruction.