Skin texture-enhancement for automated 3D point cloud generation in charcot-marie-tooth disease application

Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) is a hereditary neurological disorder which causes muscle weakness and atrophy in limbs. Assistive devices are required by CMT sufferers to enhance their mobility. To build assistive-devices for these sufferers, it is necessary to obtain their limb size and shape in 3D. The current desirable 3D modelling accuracy to enable the construction of an orthotic device is 1-2 mm. However, it is difficult to keep a CMT sufferer still during the 3D measurement. Therefore, optical video capture systems which allow simultaneous image capture are needed. Automated 3D point cloud generation of the object surface from images using the Photomodeler commercial software requires good-quality surface texture. The objective of this research was to develop a suitable technique to enhance the skin surface texture of the patients´ limb to facilitate video imaging and measurement. The results indicate that the 3D point cloud generated from dark-red colour body paint produced the least amount of data gaps when the imaging per surface is limited to two or three photographic shots.