Overview of surface registration techniques including loop minimization for three-dimensional modeling and visual inspection

Abstract

3D modeling is an important topic concerning visual inspection in automatic quality control. Through visual inspection, it is possible to determine whether a product fulfills the required specifications or whether it contains surface or volume imperfections. Although some processes such as color analysis can be achieved by 2D techniques, more challenging tasks such as volume inspection of large and complex objects/scenes may require the use of accurate 3D registration techniques. 3D simultaneous localization and mapping has become a very important research topic not only in the robotics field for solving problems such as robot navigation and mapping of 2D/3D scenarios but also in the computer vision community for the estimation of the camera pose and the registration of large-scale objects. Although their techniques differ slightly depending on the application, both communities tend to solve similar problems by means of different approaches. We present a survey of the techniques used by the robotics and computer vision communities, pointing out the pros and cons and potential applications of each approach. Furthermore, the most representative techniques have been programmed and tested, obtaining experimental results that provide an accurate comparison of the methods in the presence of noise and outliers.