Fusing structured light consistency and Helmholtz normals for 3D reconstruction

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a 3D reconstruction approach which combines a structured light based consistency measure with dense normal information obtained by exploiting the Helmholtz reciprocity principle. This combination compensates for the individual limitations of techniques providing normal information, which are mainly affected by low-frequency drift, and those providing positional information, which are often not well-suited to recover fine details. To obtain Helmholtz reciprocal samples, we employ a turntable-based setup. Due to the reciprocity, the structured light directly provides the occlusion information needed during the normal estimation for both the cameras and light sources. We perform the reconstruction by solving one global variational problem which integrates all available measurements simultaneously, over all cameras, light source positions and turntable rotations. For this, we employ an octree-based continuous min-cut framework in order to alleviate metrification errors while maintaining memory efficiency. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm both on synthetic and real-world data.