Hand-guided 3D surface acquisition by combining simple light sectioning with real-time algorithms

Precise 3D measurements of rigid surfaces are desired in many fields of application like quality control or surgery. Often, views from all around the object have to be acquired for a full 3D description of the object surface. We present a sensor principle called "Flying Triangulation" which avoids an elaborate "stop-and-go" procedure. It combines a low-cost classical light-section sensor with an algorithmic pipeline. A hand-guided sensor captures a continuous movie of 3D views while being moved around the object. The views are automatically aligned and the acquired 3D model is displayed in real time. In contrast to most existing sensors no bandwidth is wasted for spatial or temporal encoding of the projected lines. Nor is an expensive color camera necessary for 3D acquisition. The achievable measurement uncertainty and lateral resolution of the generated 3D data is merely limited by physics. An alternating projection of vertical and horizontal lines guarantees the existence of corresponding points in successive 3D views. This enables a precise registration without surface interpolation. For registration, a variant of the iterative closest point algorithm - adapted to the specific nature of our 3D views - is introduced. Furthermore, data reduction and smoothing without losing lateral resolution as well as the acquisition and mapping of a color texture is presented. The precision and applicability of the sensor is demonstrated by simulation and measurement results.Comment: 19 pages, 22 figure

Single-shot 3D sensing with improved data density

We introduce a novel concept for motion robust optical 3D-sensing. The concept is based on multi-line triangulation. The aim is to evaluate a large number of projected lines (high data density) in a large measurement volume with high precision. Implementing all those three attributes at the same time allows for the "perfect" real-time 3D movie camera (our long term goal). The key problem towards this goal is ambiguous line indexing: we will demonstrate that the necessary information for unique line indexing can be acquired by two synchronized cameras and a back projection scheme. The introduced concept preserves high lateral resolution, since the lines are as narrow as the sampling theorem allows, no spatial bandwidth is consumed by encoding of the lines. In principle, the distance uncertainty is only limited by shot noise and coherent noise. The concept can be also advantageously implemented with a hand-guided sensor and real-time registration, for a complete and dense 3D-acquisition of complicated scenes

Uncalibrated Deflectometry with a Mobile Device on Extended Specular Surfaces

We introduce a system and methods for the three-dimensional measurement of extended specular surfaces with high surface normal variations. Our system consists only of a mobile hand held device and exploits screen and front camera for Deflectometry-based surface measurements. We demonstrate high quality measurements without the need for an offline calibration procedure. In addition, we develop a multi-view technique to compensate for the small screen of a mobile device so that large surfaces can be densely reconstructed in their entirety. This work is a first step towards developing a self-calibrating Deflectometry procedure capable of taking 3D surface measurements of specular objects in the wild and accessible to users with little to no technical imaging experience