409 
FAST CONTINUOUS 360 DEGREE COLOR 3D LASER SCANNER 
Aiwu Zhang a ’ *, Shaoxing Hu b , Yulin Chen a , Haiyun Liu b , Fan Yang 3 , Jia Liu a 
a Key Laboratory of 3D Information Acquisition and Application of Ministry of Education, 
Capital Normal University, Beijing 100037, zhangawl63@163.com 
b School of Mechanical Engineering & Automation, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 
Beijing 100083, husx@buaa.edu.cn 
WG 1/2 - SAR and LiDAR Systems 
KEY WORDS: 3D laser scanning, Data Acquisition, Multiview geometry, Calibration, Texture mapping 
ABSTRACT: 
There are many needs for the ability to fast acquire 3D data from environmental surroundings, such as navigation, mapping, 
localisation and robot mobility, fire and police planning, urban planning, but the technology for acquiring dense, wide ranging, 
accurate 3D data is too expensive to be used widely. A low-cost, 360° continuous scanning, portable 3D laser scanner is presented. 
The accuracy of the portable laser scanner was analyzed in detail, and an algorithm of systematic measurement error compensation 
was given. On the other hand, a sequence of images was captured by a hand-held digital camera, and then 2D images were fast 
mapped on 3D point cloud by a method proposed based-on multiview geometry. The experimental results show that the portable 
laser scanner has higher measuring accuracy and better data quality. Its max range of the scanner is 80m, and its accuracy can 
achieved 6 mm. The portable laser scanner can measure black objects, it well suit tunnel measurement. The weight of the portable 
laser scanner is less than 6kg, it can be installed on unmanned aircrafts. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
3D laser scanner is a new active remote sensing system 
developed in the last ten years, and it can scan thousands of 
points to a point cloud of 3D data of the object and be operated 
at night. To a certain extent, 3D laser scanner meets the data 
demands of some applications such as city planning, fire and 
police planning, underground mine measurement, tunnel 
measurement, and so on. 3D laser scanners have a huge 
application market. Unhappily, up to now, there is still no 
homemade 3D laser scanner on Chinese market. The foreign 
commercial 3D laser scanner has a high price, the terrestrial 3D 
laser scanner is about Y 1,000,000, and airborne 3D laser 
scanner is about Y 15,000,000. In this case, we developed a 
low-cost, 360° continuous scanning, portable 3D laser scanner. 
The portable laser scanner can collect no less than 8000 points 
every second to meet the needs of fast acquiring 3D data from 
indoor and outdoor scenes, but it only costs about one fifth of 
the price of the foreign commercial 3D laser scanner. 
In practice, foreign commercial long-range or mid-range 3D 
laser scanner manufactures are not too many. There are six 
main manufacturers: Callidus, Leica, Mensi, Riegl, OpTech and 
I-Site. I-Site does not produce its own laser sensor and the laser 
sensor employs Riegl’s. Callidus, I-Site, Mensi and Riegl use 
the mirror to complete vertical scanning, which the horizontal 
scanning depends on a servo motor rotating to complete, and so 
their laser scanner can scan 360°. 
Some laser scanners measure distances with the flight time and 
some others use a phase-difference method. By computing the 
angles the coordinates of the point in the space are obtain, for 
example, Leica HDS6000 is phase-based laser scanning. We 
employ the flight time method to measure distances from sensor 
to arbitrary points on the object surface. As basic scanning 
device a time-of-flight 2D SICK laser scanner (LMS291 or 
LMS200) is used, and which is combined with an additional 
servo drive to reach the third dimension. For our laser scanner 
design, accurate synchronization of the laser measurement and 
the scanning device is very important, and the compensation of 
systematic errors is also a key task. Moreover, we also discuss 
an approach to map 2D images from a hand-held camera onto 
3D laser points. 
The paper includes four main sections: (1) Design of the 360° 
continuous scanning, portable 3D laser scanner, (2) Error 
correction of the 3D laser scanner, (3) Fast mapping the images 
onto the point cloud, (4) Analysis of experimental results. 
2. DESIGN OF THE PORTABLE 3D LASER SCANNER 
2.1 Structure Design 
The key components of the 3D laser scanner are a 2D SICK 
laser scanner (SICK LMS291 or SICK LMS200) and a rotating 
platform driven by a servo motor. 
The line scanning of the 2D SICK laser scanner can form the 
two modes with 180 ° and 100 °. The sampling resolution in the 
modes can be set at 0.25°, 0.5° and 1°, the max scanning range 
is 80m, and the scanning accuracy can be up to mm, the 
scanning baud rate can be set at 9600, 19200, 38400 and 500k. 
SICK LMS200 or SICK LMS 291 communicates with the 
computer by serial interface, whose maximum speed can reach 
75 times/sec, but the interior buffering capacity is limted (max: 
812 bytes). If we can not output the scans in time, the cache 
will be refreshed automatically, so that the part of the data 
* Corresponding author.