Novel optical-markers-assisted point clouds registration for panoramic 3D shape measurement

Panoramic 3D shape measurement for larger-scale and complex objects inevitably requires multi-view point clouds registration. However, traditional registration methods often use expensive devices or inflexible physical markers. In this paper, a novel optical-markers-assisted registration (OMAR) method is proposed, which substi-tutes traditional physical markers with optical markers for the registration. Specifically, a markers design strategy is first proposed to generate the desired optical markers according to different requirements. The designed mark-ers can be projected by using a low-cost projector or a laser with grating. The camera captures these projected markers from the object surface, and the 3D sensor collaboratively acquires the corresponding 3D point clouds. Finally, a markers-guided algorithm is specially designed to suit optical markers, which can make full use of the optical markers and recover the 360-degree 3D shape. The provided experimental results demonstrate both the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed OMAR in measuring large-scale, complex and texture-less objects. The proposed OMAR also enables flexible and non-destructive registration without losing accuracy compared with traditional registration methods.