Structured Light 3D Scanning

The same technique used for Thom's face in the Radiohead "House of Cards" video. I'll walk you through setting up your projector and camera, and capturing images that can be decoded into a 3D point cloud using a Processing application.

Point Clouds with Depth of Field from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

House of Cards Google Code project

I've included a lot of discussion about how to make this technique work, and the general theory behind it. The basic idea is:

1 Download ThreePhase
2 Rotate a projector clockwise to "portrait"
3 Project the included images in /patterns, taking a picture of each
4 Resize the photos and replace the example images in /img with them

Step 1: Theory: Triangulation

If you just want to make a scan and don't care how it works, skip to Step 3! These first two steps are just some discussion of the technique.

Triangulation from Inherent Features
Most 3D scanning is based on triangulation (the exception being time-of-flight systems like Microsoft's "Natal"). Triangulation works on the basic trigonometric principle of taking three measurements of a triangle and using those to recover the remaining measurements.

If we take a picture of a small white ball from two perspectives, we will get two angle measurements (based on the position of the ball in the camera's images). If we also know the distance between the two cameras, we have two angles and a side. This allows us to calculate the distance to the white ball. This is how motion capture works (lots of reflective balls, lots of cameras). It is related to how humans see depth, and is used in disparity-based 3D scanning (for example, Point Grey's Bumblebee).

Triangulation from Projected Features
Instead of using multiple image sensors, we can replace one with a laser pointer. If we know the angle of the laser pointer, that's one angle. The other comes from the camera again, except we're looking for a laser dot instead of a white ball. The distance between the laser and camera gives us the side, and from this we can calculate the distance to the laser dot.

But cameras aren't limited to one point at a time, we could scan a whole line. This is the foundation of systems like the DAVID 3D Scanner, which sweep a line laser across the scene.

Or, better yet, we could project a bunch of lines and track them all simultaneously. This is called structured light scanning.