Novel optical-markers-assisted point clouds registration for panoramic 3D shape measurement

•An optical-markers-assisted registration (OMAR) is proposed for panoramic 3D shape measurement.•A markers design strategy is proposed to generate the desired optical markers according to different requirements.•A markers-guided algorithm is correspondingly designed to make full use of the optical markers to recover the 360∘ 3D shape.•Experiments demonstrate that our OMAR can achieve flexible, non-destructive, high-efficiency and high-accuracy panoramic 3D shape measurement.