Robust laser stripe extraction using ridge segmentation and region ranking for 3D reconstruction of reflective and uneven surface

Laser stripe extraction is essential to 3D reconstructions of objects by triangulation laser scanning. Industrial applications require robustness against the spurious points due to multiple reflections among reflective and uneven surfaces. Our approach is a three-stage algorithm, which first detects the potential laser stripe regions, then ranks the regions on their corrected scene irradiance densities, and finally conducts the column-wise peak detection using the region ranking. The proposed method is evaluated in terms of speed, accuracy and robustness on both simulations and a real application for steel groove inspection.