RBF patching of laser scanner data

Laser scanners are used to create three-dimensional models of actual objects in real-time. Real world models digitised in this fashion often contain holes due to occlusion or poor surface reflectance for example. In this paper we detail an approach aimed at filling holes in laser scanner surface data using local radial basis function patches. This enables a complete surface representation to be created at significantly reduced computational cost compared to fitting an equivalent global radial basis function solution. Preliminary results are presented for a variety of real objects captured with a FastSCANtrade laser scanner.