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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)."

8 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Amateurs. by bigtallmofo · · Score: 5, Funny
    Creating 3D maps and worlds can be extremely labor intensive and time consuming.

    Bah! I completed my last project in exactly 6 days and used nothing but voice commands. It turned out so well I sat on my couch and ate Cheetos the entire next day. Today, there are over 6 billion users and we're only now starting to run into scalability issues.

    -God

    .

    --
    I'm a big tall mofo.
    1. Re:Amateurs. by clarkkent09 · · Score: 5, Funny

      I hear your support is terrible though. People practically have to beg on their knees to get their problems solved

      --
      Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
    2. Re:Amateurs. by eln · · Score: 5, Funny

      Your project is a case study in bad management, though. Sure, you completed the whole thing in six days, but what are we left with? Documentation that's cryptic at best, and literally billions of bugs.

    3. Re:Amateurs. by spun · · Score: 5, Funny

      Obviously, you haven't unlocked the right minigame. It's a short game, but it makes grinding fun.

      --
      - None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
  2. If you make enough simplifying assumptions... by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...all sorts of problems become simple. I'd love to take a picture with some mirrors, some windows, maybe a reflective sign or two in the background, and see the funhouse effects that result. Oh, and don't forget emissive elements (lamps), which will appear to recede to infinity.

  3. Warning: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    TFA requires Flash.

  4. Re:A question for mojokid by discards · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

  5. The differences with having Flash in photos by JoshDM · · Score: 5, Funny

    "shooting two pictures with a digital camera -- one with flash and one without. "

    This difference has already been well-expressed across the internet for years.