A Hand-held Laser Scanner based on Multi-camera Stereo-matching

Most laser scanners in engineering are extended versions of tactile measuring machines. These high precision devices are typically very expensive and hardware modifications are not possible without impairing the precision of the device. For these reasons we built our own laser-scanner system. It is based on a multi-camera reconstruction system developed for fast 3D face reconstructions. Based on this camera system, we developed a laser-scanner using GPU accelerated stereo-matching techniques and a hand-held line-laser probe. The resulting reconstruction is solely based on the known camera positions and parameters. Thus, it is not necessary to track the position and movement of the line-laser probe. This yields an inexpensive laser-scanner system where every hardware component can be modified individually for experiments and future extensions of the system. 1998 ACM Subject Classification I.3 Computer Graphics, I.3.1 Hardware Architecture, Input Devices, I.4 Image Processing and Computer Vision, I.4.8 Scene Analysis, Stereo