Noise reduction in Reality Capture with laser scans?

Development Asset Creation
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1

I’m using an RTC360 laser scanner which typically produces very clean point clouds.
Unfortunately the current set of scans I need to mesh is very noisy.

I see there is a noise profile that can be set on import but I see only see a preset for a P20 scanner.

Is there a way to do noise reduction on point cloud data before it is meshed, or is there a way to generate a noise profile for a specific scanner?

Thanks for any input!

2

Hello, what kind of noise do you mean? Is it related to the reflections? If so, the better way is clean the point cloud before importing it into RealityCapture.
If it is a general noise related to the scan and distance, you can prepare profile for RTC scanner. Check for the file noiseprofiles.xml in C:\Program Files\Capturing Reality\RealityCapture, open it in Notepad and you will see, how it should look. After that you will need to get those parameters from Leica and add them to the file.
There are some tools to clean a mesh in RealityCapture, but they can be use after mesh is processed (like smoothing tool).

3

The issue is a glossy black paint, there is no way I can clean the “fuzz” up manually, it is everywhere., like a cloud. I need a tool like in Geomagic that does the noise reduction based on the theoretical “ideal” surface.

We have scanned lots of glossy painted surfaces and I have never seen it as bad as this.

4

I have been testing the noise reduction filter in Cloud Compare … that may work to reduce the noise before meshing in Reality Capture, I’ll let you know the results.

5

I was able to do some noise reduction in Cloud Compare but it appears there are some other issues I still have to address. I think some of the scans are slightly out of alignment so I need to work on doing some fine alignment in Reality Capture to get some improvement.

6

Hi, are you scans registered before importing them into RealityCapture?

7

They should be, but I discovered that a few of them may be out of alignment by about 1 - 2 inches.
I think that is contributing to the meshing problems in addition to the noise.

8

As they should be, have you used Cyclone to register the scans? What are you laser scan import settings? Is the prior and registration poses different for the LSPs in RealityCapture?

9

I have used Cyclone Register360 to align the scans, but the environment was not ideal and it appears that there is some misalignment. I have used the slicer in Register360 to view the scans on all 3 axes and I don’t see anything wrong but the scans are noisy and its hard to see a clean line anywhere.

After I cleaned up the scans in Cloud Compare, I did meshing in Metashape and I can see there is misalignment in some of the meshes areas. Curiously, Reality Capture produced a mesh that was worse compared to the previous uncleaned scans, but this could be my limited understandin of the settings in Reality Capture.

I have used the existing registration in both Reality Capture and Metashape to this point. I am now using the fine registration tool in Cloud Compare to produce a better alignment with the cleaned scans. That is a tedious process, and since it only does scan to scan rather than considering all the scans as a group, im not confident that I will get a better result.

I will continue to work on this issue when time allows.

Thanks for your comments