Zippering

The purpose of zippering is to stitch together different views(meshes). The principle is based on the calculation of the minimum summation of distances between pairs of points within the overlap areas after alignment. The meshes to merge:

Mesh 1: Mesh 2: Mesh 3:

Different views of the final merged object surface:

View 1: View 2: View 3:

The errors in alignment can be terrible if you have no good guess about the initial transformation between the scans. The zipper program can do very little to help you once you manually do the alignment. When we obtained our range data, we paid special attention to record the changes in the position of the object. This makes our life much easier when doing the manual alignment in zippering. The program zipper is not quite efficient in general for alignment. The automatic alignment and optimization would be a plus if available.