Figure 2. Schematic diagram of the laser scanning process. A laser beam is emitted from the diode in the unit and spread into a laser plane (1). The laser plane, appearing as a line on the sphere (2), is reflected and collected by dual CCD arrays (1). The resulting 2D profile is digitized and as the unit travels along the x-axis of the object, multiple profiles are collected yielding a 3D coordinate point cloud of the surface (3).