• computer vision
• structured light
• stereo vision
• 3D
• large plant inspection

Computer Vision is one of the emerging fields in computer science. It presents a lot of challenges, that are not so easy to deal with. In this thesis it is shown the process of design and development of a computer vision system, that is able to reconstruct the three-dimensional surface of a train. This work describes the process of analysis and design of the vision system, the process of hardware's selection in such a way to meet the requirements, and the architectural aspects in order to manage a big quantity of data that comes from the vision system. The core of this work is the development of a 3D Structured Light scanner, that is able to reconstruct the 3D Geometry of the external surface of a train. It shows the importance of the image pre-processing in order to improve the accuracy and the robustness of the reconstruction. Finally, it presents some results of the tests did, at the moment, in the laboratory.