Optimal planning of indoor laser scans based on continuous optimization

The automatic scanning system of terrestrial laser scanning requires an efficient scanning solution owing to the time-consuming and labor-intensive data acquisition process. Most existing methods tend to achieve a prior scan planning by using a discrete solving process but need a user-defined discretization resolution, which often leads to the challenge of finding the scanning locations. This study describes a two-dimensional (2D) based scheme for scan planning. In the proposed method, the scanning location consensus based on multi-objective optimization is designed to guarantee the registrability and completeness of scan planning. A breadth-first strategy combined with a backtracking process is employed to find a minimal scanning location set. Validation experiments have been conducted on two real-world scenes and verified the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method. The proposed method achieves the optimal scan planning and yields almost 90%, 70% improvement on planning time compared with greedy approach and expert plans separately.