Registration and data merging for multiple sets of scan data

It is generally necessary in 3D scanning to divide a wrap-around object into several regions, each of which is measured individually. A series of pre-processing procedures must be implemented to prepare the data for use for surface reconstruction. Registration is a procedure for unifying the coordinate systems for multiple sets of scan data. Three registration algorithms, 3 points to 3 points, 3 spheres to 3 spheres and 3 planes to 3 planes, are proposed to suit different applications. Data merging is a procedure for removing overlapping data for multiple sets of scan data and for merging them into one set. A data search algorithm, based on triangulation, is combined with a few merging rules to merge the data in terms of different needs. Several experimental results are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed algorithm.