Laser 3d scanning with a webcam

Posted Dec 21st 2006 10:48AM by Will O'Brien
Filed under: pcs hacks, peripherals hacks

[Jan] noted that they've come up with an interesting, low cost method of 3d scanning over at the Institute for Robotics and Process Control. Once the software is calibrated with the preset background image, a laser line is run over the object (Just think about every sci-fi laser scanner you've ever seen) The software appears to measure the contour of the object by the breaks in the line as it's passed over the object. Once a mesh of measurements is taken, the object can be reconstructed in the software. According to [Jan] "With Their technique they won the Main Prize of the "work group for Pattern recognition" this Year in Berlin." Now, make it work under something besides windows and .NET.

Get your Design Challenge entries in! The 25th is rolling up on us quick!

Reader Comments

(Page 1)

1. Great, I now have a use for my JML laser level. It's totally useless for its intended purpose, but it will be perfect for this. In fact it looks identical to the one in the documentation.

Posted at 3:23AM on Dec 22nd 2006 by BruceR

2. So this will not work with an ordinary "laser pen" ?

Posted at 4:51AM on Dec 22nd 2006 by SeBsZ

3. cool, i'v always been intrested in 3d scaning but becouse off the cost i never realy did anything with it now all i need is a lazer. Maby i will make some automated version off this (maby mount a lazer on top off a webcam or something).

Posted at 5:52AM on Dec 22nd 2006 by D1337

4. This is interesting, just a shame I took my laser level to bits.

Posted at 6:30AM on Dec 22nd 2006 by herbicide

5. Interesting, me and a friend did a similar project a few years back for a computer vision class. That one used two cameras though.

If you have a laser pen and want to create a laser line you can do that quite easily by putting a cylindrical glass object in front of it. (Test it with the foot of a wine glass or something similar.) A cheap source for that is drink stirrers in clear plastic.

Posted at 10:03AM on Dec 22nd 2006 by Hast

6. well, the software looks like it only requires .net 1.1, so it might run under mono.
(http://www.mono-project.com/)

Posted at 10:53AM on Dec 22nd 2006 by torenc

7. Will seemed to suggest that there was something wrong with .NET...?

In any case it'll probably work with Mono.

Posted at 4:08PM on Dec 22nd 2006 by Matt

8. lol, we had a similar project in the german "youth's researching" in 2004, which won the first price in the under-18 category.

Posted at 11:01AM on Dec 23rd 2006 by H3PO

9. No source code?
A university that publishes a project with no source code? What is the purpose if I cannot see how it was implemented?

Posted at 9:15PM on Dec 24th 2006 by Juul

10. Hey this works. Went through 3 laser levels before I got it to do its thing. The laser has to be BRIGHT! Ironically enough, the first thing I scanned was my wacom pen..:P The software doesnt allow for "stitching" various views together to create a complete 3d model but a cheap and efficient 3d scanner none the less...congrats!

Posted at 3:41AM on Dec 30th 2006 by [akisan]

11. This is one of the coolest hacks I've ever seen. So easy...anyone could do it with 30 bucks. Only problem I ran into was the "Strait Line Laser Level 120" that I used wasn't quite bright enough to show accross the background. It would always give me "Left side not bright enough" or a similar error.

Still an awesome hack. I could see this being used as an easy way to make realistic weapons and such for video games. I'm gonna see what I can do

Posted at 2:10PM on Jan 1st 2007 by Chris

12. what kind of output is the image? can it be utilized imiediatly in autocad or solidworks or pro-e? is a conversion needed?

Posted at 9:06AM on Jan 3rd 2007 by bart

13. I went out last night and bought a laser line level to do this. It does work and if you play with it for about an hour it works damn good. We made a giant calibration area in the corner of a room and did full body scans. Close up face scars come out eerily good sometimes, it all depends on your incidence angle of the laser. With some fine tuning this stuff could be useful, especially for reference modeling.

Posted at 2:56PM on Jan 31st 2007 by mschumi

14. Hi,
some useful info can be gained from:
http://laserscanning.org.uk/forum/

Jae

Posted at 5:52PM on Nov 4th 2007 by Jason Warren

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