A mobile platform for acquisition of 3 D - models of large environments – The Wägele 1

Imagine a 3D Television system where the user can freely choose his point of view in real-time during watching three-dimensional movies or documentaries. Clearly, one key component to 3D movie making will be the 3D model acquisition process for background models where the actors can be put to life in 3D. In this paper we present a new mobile 3D model acquisition platform to reach this dream. The platform uses 2D laser range scanners for both self localization by scan matching and geometry acquisition and a panorama camera. 3D models are acquired just by moving the platform through the scene to be captured. Thereby, geometry is acquired continuously and color images are taken in regular intervals. Two data processing flows are presented, a laser range scanner based flow and an omnidirectional stereo vision flow based on graph cuts. Both flows result in textured 3D point clouds – various examples and a comparison are given in this paper.