Automated 3D scan multi-view registration based on rotation estimation

A new approach is presented for automatic registration of a sequence of 3D scanned range images into a complete model. Provided that the user follows the proposed scanning strategy, the difficulty to register the split views into a complete model is alleviated and success rate of automatic registration is improved by an adaptive forward estimation based on the extracted rotation axes and angles of the object between each scanning steps. The basic idea of this improvement is that when each of the scan differs slightly from its previous one in a small rotation about an approximately constant axis, the rotation axes and angle in the previous scanning step can be used as the first estimation of the rotation in the next step, so as to avoid manual coarse initial alignment. Formulation of the principle is provided and experimental results demonstrated