Hello everyone,

It's been a tiring month. My friends and I have finally acquired the components of our 3D Laser Scanner and we've been busy with it ever since. It's only been few days since we were able to actually do a 3D scan and I thought I'd post some shots here.

For those of you who did not catch up with me lately, I am currently building a device that creates a 3D computer model for any real world object. Two of my friends are working with me on this project, which counts as my university summer training.

The device uses a high precision laser sensor to sample the surface of an object and produce a data set known as a Point Cloud. A special data processing software is then used to convert the point cloud into a polygon based model of the object, a process known as Reconstruction.

We’ve assembled the device in a temporary frame that allows us to perform scans till we complete the final assembly. Our first scanned object was a 7x5 cms Garfield toy. We scanned one face of the toy with 3 samples per millimeter resolution. The obtained point cloud was pretty impressive:


The point cloud itself clearly depicts the shape of the scanned object. This is because the high sampling rate makes points appear to be a continuous surface by themselves :)

Also, reconstructing the above point cloud into the polygon based model was better than I expected. Normally, trying to reconstruct a single face scan will result in many "holes" in the object surface due to the low sampling rate of surfaces that fall perpendicular to the direction of the laser beam.

Combining multiple face scans will resolve this problem as surfaces that are perpendicular to the direction of laser from one viewpoint will actually be scanned from multiple viewpoints allowing them to be sampled properly.

Anyway, with those great results, we moved to scan a much larger object. We chose a big car that measured about 50 cm x 50 cm. We scanned a single face with the same resolution of the toy and the results were astonishing.


  
Scanning a model this big makes one appreciate the high resolution of sampling. The produced point cloud was so dense that you could barely see through. Another interesting observation is that the laser sensor was able to sample the windshield, which is made of a transparent material.

This scan took approximately 11 hours, and resulted in a super high-quality output. Below are rendered shots of the car model.


All the above models were scanned from a single view angle. It hasn’t been until Thursday that we were able to capture multiple shots and merge them into a single 3D model.

Am sorry because I couldn't post pictures of the device or explain how it works. It is still too early to publish this type of information on the Internet. We still need to wait till the project is over, after which we'll be able to publish all the cool details :)