3D reconstruction of outdoor environments from omnidirectional range and color images

Abstract

This paper describes a 3D modeling method for wide area outdoor environments which is based on integrating omnidirectional range and color images. In the proposed method, outdoor scenes can be efficiently digitized by an omnidirectional laser rangefinder which can obtain a 3D shape with high-accuracy and an omnidirectional multi-camera system (OMS) which can capture a high-resolution color image. Multiple range images are registered by minimizing the distances between corresponding points in the different range images. In order to register multiple range images stably, the points on the plane portions detected from the range data are used in registration process. The position and orientation acquired by the RTK-GPS and the gyroscope are used as initial value of simultaneous registration. The 3D model which is obtained by registration of range data is mapped by the texture selected from omnidirectional images in consideration of the resolution of the texture and occlusions of the model. In experiments, we have carried out 3D modeling of our campus with the proposed method.