A PSO-Based Ball-Plate Calibration for Laser Scanner

Three coordinate laser scanner is one of the important equipments in geometric measurement and reverse engineering fields. The rapid development of manufacture precision towards precise or ultra-precise direction requires higher scanning precision. Calibration is the most direct, simplest method to check the measuring uncertainty of the scanner. This paper put forward a ball-plate based calibration method and proposed to use particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to solve the critical point-cloud sphere center fitting problem in the calibration. A practical calibration is completed on a laser scanner and the calibration results show that PSO algorithm enables to present an adequately accurate fitting centers and the proposed method is practical and effective.