Integration of vision and laser displacement sensor for efficient and precise digitizing

This paper presents a new digitizing technique which integrates computer vision methods, such as the photometric stereo approach, with the laser displacement sensors (LDS). The curvature at each point of the surface can be measured cost-effectively by the photometric stereo approach. Once the information of curvature of the surface is provided, the measuring speed of LDS can be improved by digitizing at the selected points of the surface and meanwhile the accuracy of digitization is still maintained. By means of the integration, the merits of both approaches can be achieved simultaneously and the efficiency of the digitization can be improved. Experimental results are provided to verify the proposed method