New 3D Scanning Techniques for Complex Scenes

Abstract

This thesis presents new 3D scanning methods for complex scenes, such as surfaceswith fine-scale geometric details, translucent objects, low-albedo objects,glossy objects, scenes with interreflection, and discontinuous scenes.Starting from the observation that specular reflection is a reliable visual cuefor surface mesostructure perception, we propose a progressive acquisition systemthat captures a dense specularity field as the only information for mesostructurereconstruction. Our method can efficiently recover surfaces with fine-scale geometricdetails from complex real-world objects.Translucent objects pose a difficult problem for traditional optical-based 3Dscanning techniques. We analyze and compare two descattering methods, phaseshiftingand polarization, and further present several phase-shifting and polarizationbased methods for high quality 3D scanning of translucent objects.We introduce the concept of modulation based separation, where a high frequencysignal is multiplied on top of another signal. The modulated signal inheritsthe separation properties of the high frequency signal and allows us to remove artifactsdue to global illumination. Thismethod can be used for efficient 3D scanningof scenes with significant subsurface scattering and interreflections.