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Capturing 3D Surfaces Simply With a Flash Camera

Posted by timothy on from the more-depth-than-I've-got dept.

MojoKid writes with this excerpt from Hot Hardware (linking to a video demonstration): "Creating 3D maps and worlds can be extremely labor intensive and time consuming. Also, the final result might not be all that accurate or realistic. A new technique developed by scientists at The University of Manchester's School of Computer Science and Dolby Canada, however, might make capturing depth and textures for 3D surfaces as simple as shooting two pictures with a digital camera — one with flash and one without. First an image of a surface is captured without flash. The problem is that the different colors of a surface also reflect light differently, making it difficult to determine if the brightness difference is a function of depth or color. By taking a second photo with flash, however, the accurate colors of all visible portions of the surface can be captured. The two captured images essentially become a reflectance map (albedo) and a depth map (height field)."

4 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. A question for mojokid by sm62704 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why didn't you just link to the more informative New Scientist article that the blog you linked quoted?

    --
    mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
    1. Re:A question for mojokid by discards · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because it's his blog and he would like some traffic.

  2. Outside the box by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Probably has significant potential in the pr0n industry.

  3. Re:If you make enough simplifying assumptions... by Squapper · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, this only seams to work with lamertian surfaces in flat-lit enviroments.

    That's not the biggest problem though, i am a 3d-artist, and it's a pain to try to make a tiling texture map out of a picture containing more than three channels, due to stupid limitations in all 2d applications.
    It's often more efficient to first make the color texture tile, then create a heightmap from that data. I guess that's why they are targetting scientific applications such as archeology, that requires more accuracy, and also employs less skilled 3d-artists (no offense).