LightPanel: Active Mobile Platform for Dense 3D Modelling
This addresses the challenge of 3D modelling for inaccessible objects, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing Photometric Stereo methods with a new hardware setup.
The authors tackled the problem of creating accurate dense 3D models from out-of-reach objects by introducing LightPanel, an active mobile platform with light sources and a distance sensor, which achieved this through Photometric Stereo under uncontrolled lighting conditions.
In this paper we introduce a novel platform for dense 3D modelling. This platform is an active image acquisition setup assisted with a set of light sources and a distance sensor. The hardware setup is designed for being mounted on a mobile robot which is remotely driven to create accurate dense 3D models from out-of-reach objects. For this reason, the object is actively illuminated by the imaging setup and Photometric Stereo is used to recover the dense 3D model. The proposed image acquisition setup, called LightPanel, is described from design to calibration and discusses the practical challenges of using Photometric Stereo under uncontrolled lighting conditions.