Robust, precise, and calibration-free shape acquisition with an off-the-shelf camera and projector

Recently, three-dimensional (3D) shape acquisition systems composed of simple commercial devices have received significant attention from both professional and nonprofessional users. In this work, we propose a flexible projector-camera system that can accurately acquire whole shapes of 3D objects without requiring any special calibrations. The proposed system is based on structured-light and Structure-from-Motion (SfM) techniques that use coded patterns as dense discriminative features instead of the local features popularly used in SfM. To this end, recordings of coded patterns are inserted by moving the camera (to capture image data from multiple camera view points) and projection of the patterns by moving the projector. The proposed system can accurately recover even texture-less objects owing to the advantages of both SfM and structured-light. We demonstrate the benefits of this system by several experiments using real data and compare it to current methods.