Comparison of Large Surfaces from Scanned 3-D Objects

Abstract

Registration of three-dimensional objects has vast applications in many areas of science. This research is linked to the international PRESIOUS project, concerning measurement of erosion effects on cultural heritage objects. The data in question is several magnitudes larger than found in research so far, often reaching several hundred million points. This thesis presents a novel approach to registration of such large data sets by co-dividing the sets into corresponding parts and registering them locally. The same division algorithm can be used to precisely measure the distance between the data sets. We test experimentally how the local registration results can be used to obtain an optimal global transformation for the entire data set.