To obtain the real colorful three-dimensional (3-D) point cloud data model of a target surface, a 3-D point cloud color restoration method is proposed. The method uses code points, based on the colorless 3-D point cloud and colorful images of an object, as the location medium. First, multiple code points were placed near the object and thecolorless 3-D point cloud of the object; thereafter,the information of code points was captured by a 3-D scanning device based on a structure laser line. A color camera was then used to capture color images of the target from different perspectives, and then, using canny edge detection and a subpixel localization algorithm, coding point coordinate values in the images were calculated. Later, an improved method of direct linear transformation was used to solve the camera pose matrix in the world coordinate system by coding point world coordinates and pixel coordinates.The corresponding relation between the point cloud and color image pixels was then set up by the camera imaging model. Finally, interpolation was used to calculate the color of the local point cloud, and thus, complete color fusion of the entire point cloud was achieved. In the experiments, the proposed method was adopted to restore the color of multiple point cloud models. The color space position deviation of the color 3-D point cloud is less than 0.6 mm, and the reconstruction efficiency is approximately 73 000 point/s.The color 3-D point cloud exhibits high similarity with the targets.Therefore, the method can achieve the goal of color 3-D point cloud reconstruction, and the achieved calculation accuracy and efficiency can satisfy user demands.