Autoscan : a flexible and portable 3D scanner

Quantifying physical abnormalities, guiding corrective and plastic surgery, manufacturing clothing, three-dimensional CAD, and other related fields all benefit from the increasing use of 3D scanners. These scanning systems reconstruct a 3D surface as a large set of polygonal meshes. Although Cyberware scanning systems have become a commercial standard, they have two main drawbacks. First, for large objects they require a mechanical structure that cannot be installed or moved easily. Second, they only allow the scanning of objects within limited size ranges. The paper considers a portable 3D scanning system called Autoscan which provides flexibility, reliability and accuracy for scanning 3D surfaces. Autoscan consists of a pair of video cameras, a real-time image processor and a computer host.