Self-localization and 3-D model construction of pipe by rangefinder constructed with omni-directional laser and omni-directional camera

A lot of plumbings such as gas pipes and water pipes exist in public utilities, factories, power plants and so on. The use of an omni-directional camera that can take images of 360 ° in surroundings at a time is effective for the pipe inspection. However, shape measurement is difficult only with the omni-directional camera. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a reconstruction method of piping shape by using an omni-directional camera and an omni-directional laser with a light section method and a structure from motion. Our method calculates 3-D coordinates by the light section method. The individual measurement data is integrated with the information of camera motion estimated by the structure from motion technique. We construct a triangular mesh by using 3-D Delaunay triangulation. By texture-mapping, a 3-D Pipe model is generated. The validity of the proposed method is shown through experiments. © 2010 The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan.