Automated feature-based registration for reverse engineering of human models

In order to reconstruct a full 3D human model in reverse engineering (RE), a 3D scanner needs to be placed arbitrarily around the target model to capture all part of the scanned surface. Then, acquired multiple scans must be registered and merged since each scanned data set taken from different position is just given in its own local co-ordinate system. The goal of the registration is to create a single model by aligning all individual scans. It usually consists of two sub-steps : rough and fine registration. The fine registration process can only be performed after an initial position is approximated through the rough registration. Hence an automated rough registration process is crucial to realize a completely automatic RE system. In this paper an automated rough registration method for aligning multiple scans of complex human face is presented. The proposed method automatically aligns the meshes of different scans with the information of features that are extracted from the estimated principal curvatures of triangular meshes of the human face. Then the roughly aligned scanned data sets are further precisely enhanced with a fine registration step with the recently popular Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm. Some typical examples are presented and discussed to validate the proposed system.