Post-processing of Scanned 3D Surface Data

3D shape acquisition has become a major tool for creating digital 3D surface data in a variety of application fields. Despite the steady increase in accuracy, most available scanning techniques cause severe scanning artifacts such as noise, outliers, holes, or ghost geometry. To apply sophisticated modeling operations on these data sets, substantial post-processing is usually required. In this paper, we address a variety of scanning artifacts that are created by common optical scanners and provide a comprehensive set of user-guided tools to process corrupted data sets. These include an eraser tool, low-pass filters for noise removal, a set of outlier detection methods, and various up-sampling and hole-filling tools. These techniques can be applied early in the content creation pipeline. Therefore, all our tools are implemented to operate directly on the acquired point cloud. We also emphasize the need for extensive user control and an efficient visual feedback loop. The effectiveness of our scan cleaning tools is demonstrated on various models acquired with commercial laser-range scanners and low-cost structured light scanners.