Efficient Removal of Inconsistencies in Large Multi-Scan Point Clouds

Abstract

When large scale structures are to be digitized using laser scanning, usually multiple scans have to be registered and merged to cover the whole scene. During the scanning process movement in the scene and equipment standing around – which is not always avoidable – may induce artifacts. Since the scans often overlap considerably another scan of the same area might be artifact-free. In this paper we describe an approach to find these "temporal" artifacts (so-called, because they only appear during one single scan) based on shadow mapping, which makes it implementable as a shader program and therefore very fast. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated with the help of large-scale real-world data.