Surround Structured Lighting for Full Object Scanning

This paper presents a new system for acquiring complete 3D surface models using a single structured light projector, a pair of planar mirrors, and one or more synchronized cameras. We project structured light patterns that illuminate the object from all sides (not just the side of the projector) and are able to observe the object from several vantage points simultaneously. This system requires that projected planes of light be parallel, and so we construct an orthographic projector using a Fresnel lens and a commercial DLP projector. A single Gray code sequence is used to encode a set of vertically-spaced light planes within the scanning volume, and five views of the illuminated object are obtained from a single image of the planar mirrors located behind it. Using each real and virtual camera, we then recover a dense 3D point cloud spanning the entire object surface using traditional structured light algorithms. As we demonstrate, this configuration overcomes a major hurdle to achieving full 360 degree reconstructions using a single structured light sequence by eliminating the need for merging multiple scans or multiplexing several projectors.