3D laser scanner capturing normals?

Question

The Lab university I work at is in the process of purchasing a laser scanner for scanning 3D objects. All along from the start we've been trying to find a scanner that is able to capture real RAW normals from the actual scanned surface. It seems that most scanners only capture points and then the software interpolates to find the normal of the approximate surface.

Does anybody know if there is actually such a thing as capturing raw normals? Is there a scanner that can do this and not interpolate the normals from the point data?

Answer 1

Highly unlikely. Laser scanning is done using ranges. What you want would be combining two entirely different techniques. Normals could be evaluated with higher precision using well controlled lighting etc, but requiring a very different kind of setup. Also consider the sampling problem: What good is a normal with higher resolution than your position data?

Answer 2

If you already know the bidirectional reflectance distribution function of the material that composes your 3D object, it is possible that you could use a gonioreflectometer to compare the measured BRDF at a point. You could then individually optimize a computed normal at that point by comparing a hypothetical BRDF against the actual measured value.

Admittedly, this would be a reasonably computationally-intensive task. However, if you are only going through this process fairly rarely, it might be feasible.

For further information, I would recommend that you speak with either Greg Ward (Larson) of Radiance fame or Peter Shirley at NVIDIA.