Hole-free texture mapping based on laser reflectivity

For creating a three-dimensional (3D) model of a real object using a laser scanner and a camera, texture mapping is an effective technique to enhance the reality. However, in case that the positions of the camera and the laser scanner differ from each other, some textureless regions (holes) may exist on the object surface where the appearance information is missing due to the occlusion or out-of-sight of the camera. In this paper, we propose a new texture completion technique utilizing laser reflectivity for hole-free texture mapping. The laser reflectivity, which denotes the power of a reflected laser light/pulse, is obtained as by-product of the range information at laser scanning. Since the laser reflectivity captures the appearance property of the target as a camera image, it is reasonable that the regions with similar reflectance properties have similar color textures. Based on this idea, texture information in these holes is copied and pasted from the other texture regions according to the similarity and the order determined by the texture and laser reflectivity. To verify the performance of the proposed technique, we carried out texture completion experiments in real scenes.