Manual/automatic colorization for three-dimensional geometric models utilizing laser reflectivity

While laser scanners can produce a high-precision 3D shape of a real object, appearance information of the object has to be captured by an image sensor, such as a digital camera. This paper proposes a novel and simple technique for colorizing 3D geometric models based on laser reflectivity. Laser scanners capture the range data of a target object from the sensors. Simultaneously, the power of the reflected laser is obtained as a by-product of the range data. The reflectance image, which is a collection of laser reflectance depicted as a grayscale image, contains rich appearance information about the target object. The proposed technique is an alternative to texture mapping, which has been widely used to realize photo-realistic 3D modeling but requires strict alignment between range data and texture images. The proposed technique first colorizes a reflectance image based on the similarity of color and reflectance images. Then the appearance information (color and texture information) is added to a 3D model by transferring the color in the colorized reflectance image to the corresponding range image. Some experiments and comparisons between texture mapping and the proposed technique demonstrate the validity of the proposed technique.