A self-calibrating method for photogeometric acquisition of 3D objects

We present a self-calibrating photogeometric method using only off--the-shelf hardware that enables quickly and robustly obtaining multimillion point-sampled and colored models of real-world objects. Some previous efforts use a priori calibrated systems to separately acquire geometric and photometric information. Our key enabling observation is that a digital projector can be simultaneously used as either an active light source or as a virtual camera (as opposed to a digital camera, which cannot be used for both). We present our self--calibrating and multiviewpoint 3D acquisition method, based on structured light, which simultaneously obtains mutually registered surface position and surface normal information and produces a single high-quality model. Acquisition processing freely alternates between using a geometric setup and using a photometric setup with the same hardware configuration. Further, our approach generates reconstructions at the resolution of the camera and not only the projector. We show the results of capturing several high-quality models of real--world objects.