TOWARDS A 3 D TRUE COLORED SPACE BY THE FUSION OF LASER SCANNER POINT CLOUD AND DIGITAL PHOTOS

The fusion of the laser scanner data, with its very rich point cloud, and the digital image, with its very detailed information about the radiometric characteristics, to produce optimum 3D model, not only from the accuracy point of view, but also from the simplicity of capturing and the visualization quality as well, is considered recently one of the important tasks in the surveying field. In this paper, an approach to combine the laser scanner point cloud with the digital images to produce a 3D true colored point cloud will be presented. The main idea is to register the images with the point cloud in one coordinate system then each point of the cloud will be fed back by its correct color from the digital image. To extract the fine details appearing in the image and to fuse them in the point cloud with their true colors, a new technique is developed, in which the corresponding 3D coordinates for the in between image pixels are computed using the 3D coordinates of the adjacent pixels. The developed approach could be used in representing real objects more adequately with a good metric accuracy and it seems to be beneficial in fields of cultural heritage documentation, and industrial applications. * Corresponding author.