3D Shape and Indirect Appearance by Structured Light Transport

Abstract

We consider the problem of deliberately manipulating the direct and indirect light flowing through a time-varying, fully-general scene in order to simplify its visual analysis. Our approach rests on a crucial link between stereo geometry and light transport: while direct light always obeys the epipolar geometry of a projector-camera pair, indirect light overwhelmingly does not. We show that it is possible to turn this observation into an imaging method that analyzes light transport in real time in the optical domain, prior to acquisition. This yields three key abilities that we demonstrate in an experimental camera prototype: (1) producing a live indirect-only video stream for any scene, regardless of geometric or photometric complexity, (2) capturing images that make existing structured-light shape recovery algorithms robust to indirect transport, and (3) turning them into one-shot methods for dynamic 3D shape capture.