Depth from Encoded Sliding Projections

We present a novel method for 3D shape acquisition, based on mobile structured light. Unlike classical structured light methods, in which a static projector illuminates the scene with dynamic illumination patterns, mobile structured light employs a moving projector translated at a constant velocity in the direction of the projector’s horizontal axis, emitting static or dynamic illumination. For our approach, a time multiplexed mix of two signals is used: (1) a wave pattern, enabling the recovery of point-projector distances for each point observed by the camera, and (2) a 2D De Bruijn pattern, used to uniquely encode a sparse subset of projector pixels. Based on this information, retrieved on a per (camera) pixel basis, we are able to estimate a sparse reconstruction of the scene. As this sparse set of 2D-3D camera-scene correspondences is sufficient to recover the camera location and orientation within the scene, we are able to convert the dense set of point-projector distances into a dense set of camera depths, effectively providing us with a dense reconstruction of the observed scene. We have verified our technique using both synthetic and real-world data. Our experiments display the same level of robustness as previous mobile structured light methods, combined with the ability to accurately estimate dense scene structure and accurate camera/projector motion without the need for prior calibration.