A low-cost portable 3D laser scanning system with aptness from acquisition to visualization

This paper presents the design perspectives of a low-cost portable 3D laser scanning mechanism. The hardware is simple in design, easy to fabricate, and costs much less compared to the cheapest ones available in the market. Moreover, it is noninvasive and able to generate high-quality data sets. We present the complete design pipeline and discuss how to implement and put together the most recent algorithms. We propose this design for its wide applications to virtual reality simulation, 3D modeling, digitization of archaeological artifacts, automated defect inspection, object recognition etc.