A portable three-dimensional digitizer

A portable three-dimensional digitizer using a monocular camera is presented in this paper. The digitizer automatically acquires the shape of a target object as well as its texture. The digitizer has the following advantages: 1) compact and inexpensive, 2) skill-free 3D image acquisition, and 3) handles a wide range of objects of various materials. The digitizing algorithm is based on the "Shape-from-Silhouette" framework, where several novel techniques are embedded as follows. In the silhouette extraction, not only pixel-level subtraction between images but also region-level subtraction are embedded so as to achieve precise extraction. The texture acquisition is treated as a labeling problem in an energy minimization framework, which enables us to get realistic textures with a simple operation. Our experiments showed that the digitizing speed of the digitizer was practical.