Dense 3D Reconstruction with an Uncalibrated Stereo System using Coded Structured Light

In this paper, we describe a new uncalibrated active vision system. Normally, active vision systems need either precise calibrations or relatively fixed cameras and light sources, which require 3D measurement systems to make use of complicated measurement processes or measurement equipment. Recently, several uncalibrated active vision systems have been studied. Since calibrations of these systems are done either while or after shape data is obtained, the user can simply place the equipment arbitrarily and scan the objects. The proposed system is an uncalibrated active vision system which consists of a camera and a video projector. Geometrically, this is a camera-to-camera system with one camera replaced by a projector. Uncalibrated vision systems based on perspective projection devices are prone to unmeasured scaling parameters. To solve this problem, a laser pointer is attached to the projector. In the present work, coded structured light is used to obtain dense correspondence points, resulting in more detailed shape representations. Experiments using the implemented system show that it is able to reconstruct dense and precise 3D shapes.