A Handheld Texel Camera for Acquiring Near-Instantaneous 3D Images

A Texel camera is a device which synchronously captures depth information via a ladar and digital imagery of the same scene. The ladar and digital camera are co-boresighted to eliminate parallax. This configuration fuses the ladar data to the digital image at the pixel level, eliminating complex post-processing to register the datasets. This paper describes a handheld version of a Texel Camera which can be used to create near-instantaneous 3D imagery. The hardware configuration of the Texel Camera, issues and method associated with ladar/camera calibration, and representative imagery are presented.