Kinect 3D Scanning

Description

This page provides all of the information about 3D scanning project which was started as part of the Virtual BU project to provide an easier way to scan objects and import them to the virtual museum. Selected device for the objective is a Microsoft Kinect device that is made for Microsoft Xbox game console.

Device

There two product families of the device. Both (Xbox, Windows) versions of the device can work with the software that was developed for this project. There are two ways to connect the first version of the device to a computer with a Unix, Linux or a Windows operating system. They are:

• OpenKinect (http://openkinect.org/)
• OpenNI (http://75.98.78.94/)

Both methods (drivers) were tested before the initial prototype of the software. OpenNI driver is found to be more suitable.

Methods

Point Cloud Registration

Among Point cloud registration methods, which are used to minimize the distance of two point clouds with common features, Iterative Closest Point algorithm was the most feasible one for my project. I tried implementing a prototype for Iterative Closest Point algorithm using the implementation from PCL library. It didn't work out as I expected. So I tried another method which is more feasible for me.

Augmented Reality Markers

Other method I tried implementing is the Augmented Reality Marker method. Idea was to track position and rotation of those markers and estimate the position and rotation of the camera from that information. After my initial prototype it also didn't give me a satisfactory result.