Robust one-shot 3D scanning using loopy belief propagation

A structured-light technique can greatly simplify the problem of shape recovery from images. There are currently two main research challenges in design of such techniques. One is handling complicated scenes involving texture, occlusions, shadows, sharp discontinuities, and in some cases even dynamic change; and the other is speeding up the acquisition process by requiring small number of images and computationally less demanding algorithms. This paper presents a “one-shot” variant of such techniques to tackle the aforementioned challenges. It works by projecting a static grid pattern onto the scene and identifying the correspondence between grid stripes and the camera image. The correspondence problem is formulated using a novel graphical model and solved efficiently using loopy belief propagation. Unlike prior approaches, the proposed approach uses non-deterministic geometric constraints, thereby can handle spurious connections of stripe images. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified on a variety of complicated real scenes.