Innovative methodology for multi-view point cloud registration in robotic 3D object scanning and reconstruction

Abstract

The paper is concerned with the problem of multi-view three-dimensional (3D) point cloud registration. A novel global registration method is proposed to accurately register two series of scans into an object model underlying 3D imaging digitization by using the proposed oriented bounding box (OBB) regional area-based descriptor. A robot 3D scanning strategy is nowadays employed to generate the complete set of point cloud of physical objects by using 3D robot multi-view scanning and data registration. The automated operation has to successively digitize view-dependent area-scanned point cloud from complex-shaped objects by simultaneous determination of the next best robot pose and multi-view point cloud registration. To achieve this, the OBB regional area-based descriptor is employed to determine an initial transformation matrix and is then refined employing the iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm. The key technical breakthrough can resolve the commonly encountered difficulty in accurately merging two neighboring area-scanned images when no coordinate reference exists. To verify the effectiveness of the strategy, the developed method has been verified through some experimental tests for its registration accuracy. Experimental results have preliminarily demonstrated the feasibility and applicability of the developed method.