David-Laserscanner

The David Laser Scanner is a software package that with the help of which can be operated laser scanning without special hardware, ie three-dimensional models of objects can be detected. In addition to the software and a Windows PC, only a line laser and a webcam is needed.

Function

Before the actual scanning operation, a calibration is required. For this purpose, the user delivers printouts measurement points on two mutually perpendicular plates, which are then captured by the webcam. By the known position of the measuring points in the space is recovered as a bijective function between the pixel coordinates of the camera, and 3D points on the surface of the calibration object. Furthermore, the program is set to the light conditions.

During the actual scanning the object to be placed between the two calibration surfaces with free hand scanned with the laser line. In this case, the line is captured by the camera, simultaneously on two calibration surfaces and on the object being scanned. Using the previously obtained function can now for each frame, the position of the laser are determined in space, and thus also the location of illuminated by the laser spots on the surface of the scanned object.

The 3D data is displayed directly on the monitor. The scan can be continued until the density of the data is recovered satisfactorily. The generated 3D model can be exported to different file formats and further processed with any CAD and 3D programs.

Development

The development of the David laser scanner began in September 2006 by Simon Winkelbach and Sven Molkenstruck, scientific assistant at the Institute for Robotics and Process computer science at the TU Braunschweig. The concept was published as a scientific publication in September 2006 and won the DAGM - Main Prize of the German Association for Pattern Recognition.