Single-Ray LiDAR-based Scanner for Static Scenes Dense 3D Reconstruction

This paper summarizes the design of the electromechanical and software implementation of a single-ray LiDAR- scanner system for the dense 3D reconstruction of static scenes. A test bench was designed aiming to acquire precise distance measurements, using a single-ray Garmin Lite V3 LiDAR, and transform them into a high-resolution point cloud. The goal is to demonstrate the algorithm behind the laser: time-of-flight based 3D reconstruction technique. The yawing scan and pitching scan methods (rotation of the sensor around two orthogonal axis (yaw and pitch)) are used for the current application. A microcontroller application based on the Arduino Uno board was designed and implemented to acquire data from the LiDAR at different positions. Since the LiDAR is a one-dimensional sensor, the electro-mechanical setup must be capable of achieving the second and third dimensions. The information from the scanner is collected based on the spherical coordinates: theta - polar rotation angle (yaw), phi - azimuthal angle (pitch) and r - Euclidian distance. An accelerometer based PID control algorithm was developed to set the sensor at an initial azimuthal angle, prior to the scan. A desktop application was designed to collect the information from the sensor. It includes a graphical user interface used for setting the scan parameters or commencing a scan routine. A data processing application takes the acquired measurements and calculates the Cartesian coordinates of each pixel based on the parameters of the scan. A 3D reconstruction of the scan field of view is generated. The systematic errors of the system have also been calculated using a static reference scenario. Additional experiments in several static scenarios were performed for the quantitative and qualitative assessment of the results.