Creaform 3D Scanning: How to Scan the Human Body With the GoScan50

How to Scan the Human Body With the Creaform GoScan50

Creaform has an impressive range of handheld 3D Scanners that can record hundreds of thousands of points of data every second with up to 30 micron accuracy, but how would we go about scanning the human body? The high accuracy and tracking targets are great for scanning large objects to perform high accuracy inspections and for reverse engineering, but you don’t really need that kind of accuracy for the human body. You also don’t want that kind of rigorous accuracy on the human body because it is not a hard, rigid piece of plastic or metal. If you are scanning someone’s foot, for example, and they have a little twitch, the scanner would pick that up and the data after that point would be shifted for the rest of the collected data causing bad scans.

Thankfully Creaform has a solution to this problem and provides the correct tool for any job you might have. This problem can be solved with the GoScan50. The GoScan50 has a specific setting in it to allow for semi-rigid tracking. What this option does is it loosens up the algorithm a bit to compensate for small movements on the part/person being scanned. Now the person can’t shift in any dramatic way or else the scanner will just start picking up the new data as a fresh surface to scan (i.e. if you are scanning a hand and they move their thumb out to the side), but we will address this more later.

The second feature of the GoScan50 for scanning people is its ability to track natural features on the object, without the need for tracking targets. This makes for a very powerful tool to scan people without needing to add target dots at all.

Third, those abilities coupled with the GoScan50’s large scan area of 15inX15in, allows you to capture a large section at a time, and track a large area of virtual targets so the scanner does not get lost. As you can see in this picture, the large area of, eye-safe, structured light that the scanner is projecting out. This makes scanning a person or limb very quick to get done so they do not have to hold a position for any excessive amount of time.

Here is the result of the face scan within the software after just about 30 seconds of scanning.

The final thing that helps with scanning of anatomy or anything that might move on you is the capabilities of the software to help correct for any errant data and bad frames that might be collected. Within VXElements you can select a section of the scan and every frame associated with the selection can be deleted. So say you are scanning a hand to make a custom glove or a foot to make some custom shoes/boots and they shift a finger or the entire hand for a second.

In this picture, the thumb moved dramatically and was picked up as new data. This is just during the live scan process and is before the final image is rendered (this makes it much easier on the computer to collect the data).

Now we use the ‘Delete Frames’ options to select the ghost thumb and all the frames associated with it.

After deleting them all in one fell swoop, we are left with all of the scan data that was not messed up. This makes the cleanup of the data much easier so we do not have to rescan or go select and trace out the thumb manually.

Tim Crennen
Application Engineer
Computer Aided Technology