3D Data Acquisition - Eurographics 2002 Tutorial Notes

3D scanners and image acquisition systems are rapidly becoming more affordable and allow to build highly accurate models of real 3D objects in a cost- and time-effective manner. This tutorial will present the potential of this technology, review the state of the art in model acquisition methods, and will discuss the 3D acquisition pipeline from physical acquisition until the final digital model. First, different optical scanning techniques (e.g. structured light triangulation, time-of-flight approaches) will briefly be presented. Other acquisition related issues including the design of the scanning studio will be discussed and evaluated. In the area of registration, we will consider both the problems of initially aligning individual scans, and of refining this alignment with variations of the Iterative Closest Point method. For scan integration and mesh reconstruction, we will compare various methods for computing, interpolating and approximating surfaces. We will then look at various ways in which surface properties such as color and reflectance can be extracted from acquired imagery. Finally, we will examine techniques for the efficient management and rendering of very large, attribute-rich meshes, including methods for the construction of simplified triangle-based representation and sample-based rendering approaches