A portable modular system for automatic acquisition of 3D objects

A modular system which is able to reconstruct the 3D surface of an object is presented here, if has a three level architecture. The first level is devoted to the acquisition of a set of 3D points over the surface (digitisation), the second level constructs the 3D surface in the form of a mesh, filtering the measurement noise. In the third level a bitmap of the surface, obtained from a snapshot, is projected over the 3D mesh to obtain a highly realistic 3D model. This instrument improves the commercial available scanners in two main aspects. The digitiser proves highly flexible and it can easily accommodate objects of different dimension. The construction of the mesh and the filtering of the digitisation noise is carried in a single step through an algorithm which can be parallelised to work in real time. When the spot detection will be transferred to a standard graphic board and the mesh construction over a dedicated (FPGA) board, this instrument shall be seen as a standard input device of next generation graphical workstations.