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Published January 1998 | public
Book Section - Chapter

3D photography on your desk

Abstract

A simple and inexpensive approach for extracting the three-dimensional shape of objects is presented. It is based on `weak structured lighting'; it differs from other conventional structured lighting approaches in that it requires very little hardware besides the camera: a desk-lamp, a pencil and a checker-board. The camera faces the object, which is illuminated by the desk-lamp. The user moves a pencil in front of the light source casting a moving shadow on the object. The 3D shape of the object is extracted from the spatial and temporal location of the observed shadow. Experimental results are presented on three different scenes demonstrating that the error in reconstructing the surface is less than 1%.

Additional Information

© 1998 IEEE. Date of Current Version: 06 August 2002. This work is supported in part by the California Institute of Technology; an NSF National Young Investigator Award to P.P.; the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering funded by the National Science Foundation at the California Institute of Technology; and by the California Trade and Commerce Agency, Office of Strategic Technology. We wish to thank all the colleagues that helped us throughout this work, especially Luis Goncalvec, George Barbastathis, Mario Munich, and Arrigo Benedetti for very useful discussions. Comments from the anonymous reviewers were very helpful in improving a previous version of the paper.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 24, 2023