3D registration on mobile platforms using an accelerometer

In the last several years 3D shape reconstruction and 3D registration using mobile platforms, i.e. smartphones and tablets, have been an increasingly active research avenue. Besides camera(s), nowadays mobile devices are equipped with a variety of sensors, including an accelerometer, a magnetometer and a gyroscope which are, among other applications, extensively used for the task of 3D registration too. To this end usually more than two sensors are utilized. In this work we demonstrate the usage of a tablet as 3D structured light scanner, and we further propose 3D registration method using only single sensor data, supplied by an accelerometer. Briefly, using an accelerometer our method first estimates only few candidate rotations in the spatial domain. Next, for each rotation candidate, the optimal translation is computed using a correlation function, efficiently implemented in the frequency domain. The final 3D registration parameters are chosen based on ICP refinement. The experimental results show a very close agreement with ground truth data. The proposed method is not restricted to mobile platforms only, but it is applicable to any 3D device which can be upgraded with an ubiquitous accelerometer.