Panoramic 3D reconstruction by fusing color intensity and laser range data*

Panoramic 3D reconstruction of an indoor environment is an important issue for navigation and the safety control for a robot. In this study, we examine an acquisition device constructed of a regular CCD camera and a 2D laser range scanner, along with it technique for panoramic 3D reconstruction using a data fusion algorithm based on an energy minimization framework. The acquisition device can capture two types of data of a panoramic scene without occlusion between two sensors: a dense spatio-temporal volume from a camera and distance information from it laser scanner. We resample the dense spatio-temporal volume for generating a dense multi-perspective panorama that has equal spatial resolution to that of the original images acquired using a regular camera, and also estimate a dense panoramic depth-map corresponding to the generated reference panorama by extracting trajectories from the dense spatio-temporal volume with a selecting camera. Moreover, for determining distance information robustly, we propose a data fusion algorithm that is embedded into an energy minimization framework that incorporates active depth measurements using a 2D laser range scanner and passive geometry reconstruction from an image sequence obtained using the CCD camera. Thereby, measurement precision and robustness can be improved beyond those available by conventional methods using either passive geometry reconstruction (stereo-vision techniques) or, a laser range scanner. Experimental results using both synthetic and actual images show that our approach can produce high-quality panoramas and perform accurate 3D reconstruction in a panoramas environment.