Automatic registration of laser reflectance and colour intensity images for 3D reconstruction

The objective of the work presented in this paper is to generate complete, high-resolution models of real world scenes from passive intensity images and active range sensors. In previous work, an automatic method has been developed in order to compute 3D models of real world scenes from laser range data. The aim of this project is to improve these existing models by fusing range and intensity data. The paper presents different techniques in order to find correspondences between the different sets of data. Based on these control points, a robust camera calibration is computed with a minimal user intervention in order to avoid the fastidious point and click phase that is still necessary in many systems. The intensity images are then re-projected into the laser coordinate frame to produce an image that combines the laser reflectance and the available video intensity images into a colour texture map. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.