The following study reports on the preliminary results of a novel processing technique for characterizing the three-dimensional distribution of airborne and ground-based LiDAR data for conifer and mixed deciduous forest plots. The frequency of laser returns within 1m x 1m x 1m cubes (voxels) and the plotting of percentile distributions within each column (e.g. 1m x 1m x 25m, x, y, z) may benefi...

Accuracy in localizing the brain areas that generate neuromagnetic activity in magnetoencephalography (MEG) is dependent on properly co-registering MEG data to the participant's structural magnetic resonance image (MRI). Effective MEG-MRI co-registration is, in turn, dependent on how accurately we can digitize anatomical landmarks on the surface of the head. In this study, we compared the perfo...

A statistical representation of three-dimensional shapes is introduced, based on a novel four-dimensional feature. The feature parameterizes the intrinsic geometrical relation of an oriented surface-point pair. The set of all such features represents both local and global characteristics of the surface. We compress this set into a histogram. A database of histograms, one per object, is sampled ...

We describe the vision system for Alvin, the Autonomous Land Vehicle, addressing in particuly the task of road-following. The system builds symbolic descriptions of the road and obstacle boundaries using both video and range sensors. Road segmentation methods are described for video-based road-following, along with approaches to boundary extraction and the transformation of boundaries in the im...

In this paper we describe the development of a three-dimensional (3D) imaging system for a 3500 tonne mining machine (dragline). Draglines are large walking cranes used for removing the dirt that covers a coal seam. Our group has been developing a dragline swing automation system since 1994. The system so far has been “blind” to its external environment. The work presented in this paper attempt...

Three dimensional scanning is gaining popularity in the biomedical field for various applications where a 3D model of the external features of an anatomical part is beneficial. An analysis of two different calibration techniques, an analytical method and a least squares method, for a simple, low cost, 3D laser light-sectioning scanner system is presented. Both methods are evaluated according to...

Airborne laser scanning data has proven to be a very suitable technique for the determination of digital surface models and is more and more being used for mapping and GIS data acquisition purposes, including the detection and modeling of man-made objects or vegetation. The aim of the work presented here is to segment raw laser scanner data in an unsupervised classification using anisotropic he...

This project entitled " Implementation of the Laser Range Sensor BrickSick LMS 200" deals with the design and implementation of a sensor brick comprising the laser range sensor-LMS 200 manufactured by Sick as the major component of the brick for acquisition. This brick is expected to be an independent unit, capable of operating for various purposes. One of the major goals of devising such a bri...

The problem of building maps of the environment is one of the fundamental problems in mobile robotics. So far, the majority of research has focused on the problem of how to learn two-dimensional maps such as occupancy grids. Robots, however, operate in a three-dimensional world. Accordingly, robots that use tree-dimensional maps can be expected to be more reliable and robust than those relying ...

SUMMARY The registration of point clouds forms the first task associated with building 3D models from laser scanner data in cases where multiple scans are required for complete coverage of the scene or object being recorded. This paper presents an image-based registration method for terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) data in which the transformation parameters of one data set with respect to anoth...