Reconstruction and analysis of shapes from 3D scans

Abstract

In this thesis we use 3D laser range scans for the acquisition, reconstruction, and analysis of 3D shapes. 3D laser range scanning has proven to be a fast and effective way to capture the surface of an object in a computer. Thousands of depth measurements represent a part of the surface geometry as a cloud of 3D points and geometric algorithms have been developed to turn such 3D point sets into manageable shapes and shape representations for end users or other algorithms. We use 3D laser range scans to evaluate acquisition and reconstruction systems and algorithms, to fully automate the object reconstruction, to find discriminative face features, for automatic landmark extraction, for face identification with and without expressions, and for the statistical modeling of faces.