Automatic coarse registration of range maps

Range map registration is still the most time consuming phase in 3D scanning. This is because real scanning set are composed of hundreds of range maps and their registration is still partially manual. We propose a new method which allows to manage complex scan sets acquired by following a regular scanner pose pattern. The method makes proficient use of some initial considerations and auxiliary data structures, which allow to simplify the range map registration problem. It is designed as an iterative solution, where pairs of correspondent vertices are selected through the computation of a regular n * n kernel which takes into account vertex normals and is defined in the 2D space of the range map (represented in implicit 2D format rather than as a triangle mesh in 3D space). The shape-characterization kernel and the metrics defined give a sufficiently accurate shape matching, which has been proven to fit well the requirements of automatic registration. The solution proposed has been tested on a number of complex scanning set and results are impressively better than previous solutions.