Stochastic Surface Mesh Reconstruction

Abstract

A generic and practical methodology is presented for 3D surface mesh reconstruction from the terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) derived point clouds. It has two main steps. The first step deals with developing an anisotropic point error model, which is capable of computing the theoretical precisions of 3D coordinates of each individual point in the point cloud. The magnitude and direction of the errors are represented in the form of error ellipsoids. The following second step is focused on the stochastic surface mesh reconstruction. It exploits the previously determined error ellipsoids by computing a point-wise quality measure, which takes into account the semi-diagonal axis length of the error ellipsoid. The points only with the least errors are used in the surface triangulation. The remaining ones are automatically discarded.

High-Precision 3D Object Capturing with Static and Kinematic Terrestrial Laser Scanning in Industrial Applications—Approaches of Quality Assessment

“…This is the case for some large manufacturers (Z + F, Leica, Wetzlar, Germany). For laser scanners from brands that do not offer these possibilities, other approaches [20,21] can be chosen. The precision determined with this approach includes the influences of the distance measurement, the angle of incidence and the object properties.…”

“…Backward modeling approaches are mainly 3D point clouds to point cloud comparisons (Cloud2Cloud) [19]. Surface based approaches are shown in [20,21]. The comparison of captured 3D point clouds to highly accurate 3D reference point clouds [22] is suitable here to investigate the accuracy.…”