Overview:
This page is dedicated to the EE148/CS274 class, an excellent course offered at Caltech. The class deals with the reconstruction of objects, using a commercially available LCD projector and a CCD camera. Keep reading for the description of the method.
Why it is important:
Probably all of us want to go visit the Louvre museum in Paris or Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London. But how many of us have the money and/or the time? Developing a good method to scan the objects and have them in a format that can be displayed on the Web would allow us to visit virtually any museum in the world.
Another interesting area would be reverse engineering, where one can create the project of a tool/device, given the actual object. This way the object could be easily modified and manufactured again.
Yet, another reason would be to get your custom clothing. Wouldn't you like to have your favorite pair of CK jeans that perfectly fits you? It is easy... Scan in your legs and send them to a CK factory.
There is one common answer for all these problems: 3D Photography
The Method:
The idea is to recover the shape of the object, i.e. the 3D coordinates of as many points as possible from the surface of the object. That is done by projecting stripes of various widths on the object and acquiring images in order to determine the boundaries of the stripes. This is a very brief description. For more on this topic read this paper. The method of recovering the points is called triangulation.
The method is based on the following steps:
Results:
Discussion: