Point Clouds Construction Algorithm from a Home-Made Laser Scanner

Reverse engineering (RE) technique is now becoming an emerging technology for modeling a physical part into a digital model. This is eventually required when one has to redesign an old product or to remanufacture a non-filed engineering product. This technique involves manufacturing a new interesting product or redesigning an existing product in order to quickly respond the consumer needs. This approach has an important role in facing the tight industrial competition. Producers are racing to implement this new technology to win the market. Hardware to carry out reverse engineering is still an expensive thing. In implementing this technique in an educational laboratory a self-made scanning facility is developed. The scanner plots a silhouette lines on an object surface and a camera is used to take the images of the object. These lines are then mathematically transformed to get a digital representation of the object surface. The digital information is constructed from a huge number of points that represent the surface points of the scanned object. Coordinates of those points are calculated using triangulation method. Image processing and manipulation are conducted in MATLAB to easily process the digital image and to show the 3-D representation.