Overview of 3D registration techniques including loop minimization for the complete acquisition of large manufactured parts and complex environments

3D modelling is becoming an important research topic for visual inspection in automatic quality control. Through visual inspection it is possible to determine whether a product fulfills the required specifications or whether it contains surface or volume imperfections. Although some process such as color analysis can be achieved by 2D techniques, more challenging tasks such as volume inspection of large and complex objects/scenes may require the use of accurate 3D registration techniques. 3D Simultaneous Localization and Mapping has become a very important research topic not only in the computer vision community for quality control applications but also in the robotics field for solving problems such as robot navigation and registration of large surfaces. Although their techniques differ slightly depending on the application, both communities tend to solve similar problems by means of different approaches. This paper presents a survey of the techniques used by the robotics and computer vision communities in which every approach has been compared pointing out their pros and cons and their potential applications.