Sensor Fusion of Cameras and a Laser for City-Scale 3D Reconstruction

This paper presents a sensor fusion system of cameras and a 2D laser sensor for large-scale 3D reconstruction. The proposed system is designed to capture data on a fast-moving ground vehicle. The system consists of six cameras and one 2D laser sensor, and they are synchronized by a hardware trigger. Reconstruction of 3D structures is done by estimating frame-by-frame motion and accumulating vertical laser scans, as in previous works. However, our approach does not assume near 2D motion, but estimates free motion (including absolute scale) in 3D space using both laser data and image features. In order to avoid the degeneration associated with typical three-point algorithms, we present a new algorithm that selects 3D points from two frames captured by multiple cameras. The problem of error accumulation is solved by loop closing, not by GPS. The experimental results show that the estimated path is successfully overlaid on the satellite images, such that the reconstruction result is very accurate.