DAVID-Laserscanner 2.4.3

DAVID-Laserscanner 2.4.3 is a powerful but east-to-use freeware software that allows you to scan/digitize three-dimensionals objects. DAVID-Laserscanner is a freeware software application for 3d laser range scanning. All you need to build a 3d scanner is a PC, a camera (e.g. a webcam), a background corner and a laser that projects a line onto the object you want to scan.

So everyone can use it to scan objects without high costs; this is the big advantage over commercial solutions which are rather expensive. The concept has been developed by the computer scientists Dr. Simon Winkelbach, Sven Molkenstruck and Prof. F. M. Wahl at the Institute for Robotics and Process Control, Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany and was published as a paper at the German Association for Pattern Recognition.

The object you want to scan has to be put in front of a known background geometry (e.g. into the corner of a room or in front of two planes with an exact angle of 90). The camera of course has to be pointed towards the object. The special thing about this solution is that you freely hold the laser in your hand, "brushing" the laser line over the object.

Meanwhile the computer automatically calculates 3D coordinates of the scanned object surface. To obtain a complete 360 degree model of your 3d object, DAVID-Shapefusion is created that automatically "puzzles" together the laser scans made from different sides.

Major Features:

1. Compatible to most cameras with Microsoft Windows drivers (WDM): You can use nearly every MS-Windows compatible camera with WDM support, like your web-cam or fire-wire camera. You can even use your camcorder if you can connect it to your PC (and if you have suitable WDM drivers).  
2. Precise and automatic camera calibration: It is not possible to get accurate 3d data with an uncalibrated camera. Fortunately DAVID provides a well-integrated and easy to use calibration for automatic computation of the camera's pose and focal length, as well as for compensation of radial lens distortions. Therefore you can accurately scan your objects with absolute scale.
   
3. Data smoothing and interpolation: By moving the laser like a paintbrush, you can sweep over the object until the scan results are smooth and all gaps are filled. Beside that, you can use the gap interpolation and smoothing filters of DAVID to refine your scans.  
4. Texture support: You can grab a camera shot that will be used as texture. The texturized 3d model can be inspected in the 3d window. Furthermore DAVID exports texture coordinates, which allows you to import the textured object in third-party software.
5. Integrated 3d viewer: Inspect your 3d model right after scanning with the integrated OpenGL-based 3D viewer of DAVID.
   
6. File export: Save your scanned object as Alias Wavefront OBJ file. The OBJ-format is an well-established plain text format for triangle meshes and is supported by many 3d applications. (Further file formats can be exported with DAVID-Shapefusion.)
7. Outlier removal: By moving a simple slider you can choose which surface segments will be removed and which will be retained. Also you can delete surface parts easily with your mouse. A preview of the result is shown in a 3D window.
8. Automatic and user-driven alignment: A precise alignment of your scans is very easy. Just choose one of six different registration modes and a few seconds and mouse clicks later, you get the aligned result.
9. Robust surface fusion: You can fuse/merge the aligned scans with a single mouse click. The result is a connected regular triangle mesh. The fusion method is more than just an ordinary mesh stitching, since it calculates the average of overlapping surface parts and reduces noise and outliers.
10. Texture support:  In all alignment and fusion steps, textures are processed along with the 3d data. The result is a fused triangle mesh with a fused texture.
11. User-defined mesh resolution and mesh smoothness: You can define the mesh resolution and smoothness value to optimize the fusion result for your intended application.
12. OBJ, PLY, and STL file export: Choose between the OBJ, PLY, and STL file format to save your fusion result or your aligned and filtered 3d scans.

Enhancements

• As usual, there are some more nice improvements both for beginners and pros, like:
• Increased precision
• Improved lens un-distortion and calculation of the 3D laser light
• plane position, reducing deformations and waviness of scan data.
• Default camera parameters included
• Setting up the camera parameters is one of the most difficult steps
• For beginners. For some camera models, DAVID has default parameters that
• Will help you get started. Of course some adjustments will be necessary,
• Since every setup is different...
• COMmunication
• For those who automate their scanning setups, DAVID has improved
• Capability of communicating over a (virtual) COM port in both directions.
• You can control many DAVID functions remotely, or even synchronize single
• Camera frames to laser motor steps, which is especially interesting for
• Scanning Without Background!