Study on Real-Time Point Cloud Superimposition on Camera Image to Assist Environmental Three-Dimensional Laser Scanning

Abstract

Recently, three-dimensional (3D) laser scanning technology using terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) has been widely used in the fields of plant manufacturing, civil engineering and construction, and surveying. It is desirable for the operator to be able to immediately and intuitively confirm the scanned point cloud to reduce unscanned regions and acquire scanned point clouds of high quality. Therefore, in this study, we developed a method to superimpose the point cloud on the actual environment to assist environmental 3D laser measurements, allowing the operator to check the scanned point cloud or unscanned regions in real time using the camera image. The method included extracting the correspondences of the camera image and the image generated by point clouds by considering unscanned regions, estimating the camera position and attitude in the point cloud by sampling correspondence points, and superimposing the scanned point cloud and unscanned regions on the camera image. When the proposed method was applied to two types of environments, that is, a boiler room and university office, the estimated camera image had a mean position error of approximately 150 mm and mean attitude error of approximately 1°, while the scanned point cloud and unscanned regions were superimposed on the camera image on a tablet PC at a rate of approximately 1 fps.