  Image based modeling and laser scanning are two commonly used approaches in
large-scale architectural scene reconstruction nowadays. In order to generate a
complete scene reconstruction, an effective way is to completely cover the
scene using ground and aerial images, supplemented by laser scanning on certain
regions with low texture and complicated structure. Thus, the key issue is to
accurately calibrate cameras and register laser scans in a unified framework.
To this end, we proposed a three-step pipeline for complete scene
reconstruction by merging images and laser scans. First, images are captured
around the architecture in a multi-view and multi-scale way and are feed into a
structure-from-motion (SfM) pipeline to generate SfM points. Then, based on the
SfM result, the laser scanning locations are automatically planned by
considering textural richness, structural complexity of the scene and spatial
layout of the laser scans. Finally, the images and laser scans are accurately
merged in a coarse-to-fine manner. Experimental evaluations on two ancient
Chinese architecture datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed
complete scene reconstruction pipeline.
