Active range finding * Actively lighting a scene, whether for the purpose of estimating normals using photometric stereo, or for adding artificial texture for shape from defocus, can greatly improve the performance of vision systems. = This kind of has been used from the earliest days of machine vision to construct highly precise sensors for estimating 3D depth images using a variety of * While rangefinders such as and laser-based 3D scanners were once limited to commercial and laboratory applications, the development of low-cost depth cameras such as the Microsoft Kinect have revolutionized many aspects of computer vision. *It is now common to refer to the registered olor and depth frames produced by such cameras as RGB-D (or RGBD) images One of the early active illumination sensors used in computer vision and computer graphics was a laser or light stripe sensor, which sweeps a plane of light across the scene or object while observing it from an offset viewpoint As the stripe falls across the object, it deforms its shape according to the shape of the surface it is illuminating, It is then a simple matter of using optical triangulation to estimate the 3D locations of all the points seen in a particular stripe. Knowledge of the 3D plane equation of the light stripe allows us to infer the 3D location corresponding to each illuminated pixel. The accuracy of light striping techniques can be improved by finding the exact temporal peak in illumination for each pixel .Loe m= ln 2 (a) () Co) Figure 13.8 Shape scanning using cast shadows (Bouguet and Perona 1999) © 1999 Springer: (a) camera setup with a point light source (a desk lamp without its reflector), a hand-held stick casting a shadow, and (b) the objects being scanned in front of two planar backgrounds. (c) Real-time depth map using a pulsed illumination system (Iddan and Yahav 2001) © 2001 SPIE.* Very fast scanners can also be constructed with a single laser beam, ie., a realtime *= Instgad of projecting a grid, it is also possible to project one or more sinusoidal and to then recover deformations in the surface from the relative phase displacements using a process called * The Microsoft Kinect depth camera uses a variant of this technique, projecting an , which looks like a bunch of random dots, but which in fact consists of a known calibrated pseudo-random pattern (Figure 13.9). = By measuring the horizontal displacement (parallax) between the dots seen in the IR camera and their expected locations, a depth map can be computed, interpolating over the pixels not illuminated by the dots = Kinect camera has been widely used in applications such as 3D body tracking(@) () © Figure 13.9 The Microsoft Kinect depth camera (Zhang 2012) © 2012 IEEE: (a) the hard- ware, comprising an infrared (IR) speckle pattern projector and a color and IR camera pair; (b) close-up of a sample infrared image, showing the projected dots; (c) the final depth map, which has black “shadows” in the areas not illuminated by the projector.= Instead of using a single camera, it is also possible to construct an active illumination range sensor using stereo imaging setups, resulting in a system that is often callell active (illumination) stereo. = The simplest way Is to just project random stripe pattems onto the scene to create synthetic texture, which helps match textureless surfaces = Caution about active range sensing. When the surfaces being scanned are too reflective, the camera may see a reflection off the object's surface and assume that this virtual image is the true scene = For surfaces with moderate amounts of reflection, there is still sufficient diffuse reflection under the specular layer to obtain a 3D range map. * The specular part can be recovered separately to produce a surface light field. * For true mirrors, active range scanners will invariably capture the virtual 3D model seen reflected in the mirror, so that additional techniques such as looking for a reflection of the scanning device must be used *