Depth extraction of 3D objects using axially distributed image sensing

Axially distributed image sensing (ADS) technique is capable of capturing 3D objects and reconstructing high-resolution slice plane images for 3D objects. In this paper, we propose a computational method for depth extraction of 3D objects using ADS. In the proposed method, the high-resolution elemental images are recorded by simply moving the camera along the optical axis and the recorded elemental images are used to generate a set of 3D slice images using the computational reconstruction algorithm based on ray back-projection. To extract depth of 3D object, we propose the simple block comparison algorithm between the first elemental image and a set of 3D slice images. This provides a simple computation process and robustness for depth extraction. To demonstrate our method, we carry out the preliminary experiments of three scenarios for 3D objects and the results are presented. To our best knowledge, this is the first report to extract the depth information using an ADS method.