Adaptive laser range scanning

We present an approach to laser range scanning in which quality metrics are used to automatically reduce the number of measurements acquired from a scanner viewpoint. As part of this approach we present improved versions of the orientation and reflectivity quality metrics, as well as introduce two quality metrics: resolvability and planarity. These quality metrics are used to divide the total field of view from a scanner viewpoint into regions. A subset of these regions is then automatically identified as having a significant likelihood of producing useful measurements to augment the initial range image using quality metrics. A series of targetted raster scans is then automatically generated to scan the targetted regions.