A 3-D tube reconstruction based on axis alignment of multiple laser scanning

A novel 3D tube scanning technique is proposed. The proposed tube scanning technique is developed for a special tube inspection module which consists of four line-lasers and one camera. Using the scanning module, we can reconstruct the 360 degree shapes of the inner surfaces of a cylindrical tube. From an image frame captured by the camera, we reconstruct a partial tube model based on four laser triangulations. Then by aligning such partial models with respect to a reference tube axis, a complete 3D shape of the tube is reconstructed. The tube axis in each reconstructed frame is aligned with a 3D Euclidean transformation to the reference axis. Several experiments show that the proposed method can align multiple tube axes very accurately and reconstruct 3D shapes of a tube with very low shape distortion.