Unsynchronized Structured Light

by Daniel Moreno, Fatih Calakli, and Gabriel Taubin
Proceeding of SIGGRAPH Asia 2015
doi: 10.1145/2816795.2818062

This project was sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Various Structured Light (SL) methods are used to capture 3D range images, where a number of binary or continuous light patterns are sequentially projected onto a scene of interest, while a digital cam- era captures images of the illuminated scene. All existing SL meth- ods require the projector and camera to be hardware or software synchronized, with one image captured per projected pattern. A 3D range image is computed from the captured images. The two synchronization methods have disadvantages, which limit the use of SL methods to niche industrial and low quality consumer ap- plications. Unsynchronized Structured Light (USL) is a novel SL method which does not require synchronization of pattern projec- tion and image capture. The light patterns are projected and the images are captured independently, at constant, but possibly dif- ferent, frame rates. USL synthesizes new binary images as would be decoded from the images captured by a camera synchronized to the projector, reducing the subsequent computation to standard SL. USL works both with global and rolling shutter cameras. USL enables most burst-mode-capable cameras, such as modern smart- phones, tablets, DSLRs, and point-and-shoots, to function as high quality 3D snapshot cameras. Beyond the software, which can run in the devices, a separate SL Flash, able to project the sequence of patterns cyclically, during the acquisition time, is needed to enable the functionality.

You can download the PAPER and the SLIDES

News article published by Brown News on December 23, 2015
Algorithm helps turn smartphones into 3-D scanners