Microscale Optical Capture System for Digital Fabric Recreation

Synthetic images are ubiquitous in the world, being extensively used in advertising, industrial design and prototyping. However, automatic digital reproduction of fabrics is still an open problem in industrial contexts, due to the inherent complexity of cloth appearance. We present a system to capture images of fabrics at micron resolution, lit from a set of collimated beams of LED luminaires distributed along the hemisphere. The system ensures plane wavefront with a 1:1 magnification while minimizing self-occlusions. It also allows for specular and diffuse light components separation through polarization, has a very accurate focusing system and a shallow depth of field for depth extraction. We demonstrate the system is suitable for later extraction of geometric and optical properties of the cloth at the fiber level, which is the main requisite for high fidelity photo-realistic cloth rendering.