Accurate surface reconstruction of large 3D objects from range data

An algorithm for 3D surface reconstruction of large objects using a structured light pattern ranging system is presented. Highly accurate industrial inspection applications have been constrained by the limited range resolution and accuracy of current ranging devices and techniques. To overcome the limited range resolution, the ranging sensor uses a small field-of-view and multiple views. The proposed algorithm fuses surface data patches from the views to construct a large object surface. The algorithm also increases the accuracy of the reconstructed object with efficient numerical analysis and pre-processing. Experimental results show that the algorithm and the current sensor setup can reconstruct an object for inspection applications with the accuracy of approximately I mil (2.54 mum) tolerance.