Low-Cost Laser Range Scanner and Fast Surface Registration Approach

In the last twenty years many approaches for contact-free measurement techniques for object surfaces and approaches for 3d object reconstruction have been proposed; but often they still require complex and expensive equipment. Not least due to the rapidly increasing number of efficient 3d hard- and software system components, alternative low-cost solutions are in great demand. We propose such a low-cost system for 3d data acquisition and fast pairwise surface registration. The only hardware requirements are a simple commercial hand-held laser and a standard grayscale camera.