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Published November 1999 | public
Journal Article

3D photography using shadows in dual-space geometry

Abstract

A simple and inexpensive approach for extracting the three-dimensional shape of objects is presented. It is based on 'weak structured lighting'. It requires very little hardware besides the camera: a light source (a desk-lamp or the sun), a stick and a checkerboard. The object, illuminated by the light source, is placed on a stage composed of a ground plane and a back plane; the camera faces the object. The user moves the stick in front of the light source, casting a moving shadow on the scene. The 3D shape of the object is extracted from the spatial and temporal location of the observed shadow. Experimental results are presented on five different scenes (indoor with a desk lamp and outdoor with the sun) demonstrating that the error in reconstructing the surface is less than 0.5% of the size of the object. A mathematical formalism is proposed that simplifies the notation and keep the algebra compact. A real-time implementation of the system is also presented.

Additional Information

© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. This work is supported in part by the California Institute of Technology; an NSF National Young Investigator Award to P.P.; a STC fund; the Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering funded by the National Science Foundation at the California Institute of Technology. We wish to thank all the colleagues that helped us throughout this work, especially Peter Schröder, Paul Debevec, Wolfgang Stürzlinger, Luis Goncalves, George Barbastathis and Mario Munich for very useful discussions. Very special thanks go to Silvio Savarese for his work on the real-time implementation of our algorithm.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 26, 2023