Design and analysis of a 3D laser scanner

A new laser scanner is designed, built and its scan measurement uncertainty is analyzed and deviations are minimized. The design is comprised of the physical setup of scanner, point cloud extraction as well as procedures for scanner calibration. It is designed to operate in a spherical domain, thereby giving wide imaging view possibilities. By exploiting strategies in real-time serial communication and image processing, the prototype acquires uniformly dense point cloud from a geometric specimen. In addition to design, rather than using benchmark geometry to only assess the accuracy of the scanner, data obtained from a known geometric model are used to modify the scanner parameters to obtain optimal results. A method of finding scanner parameters that provides least point deviations is developed using least squares. The methods of calibration and optimization of the scanner prototype in this paper can be extended to any type of scanner design.