A camera flash based projector system for true scale metric reconstruction

Computer vision techniques have been applied for rapid and accurate structure recovery in many fields. Most methods perform poorly in areas containing little or no texture and in presence of repetitive patterns. We present a portable, cost-effective pattern projector system powered by the flash of a camera, to aid the reconstruction of such areas. No calibration is required between the camera-projector, projector-scene or pattern. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system on various representative surfaces like metal, clay, porcelain and natural fibres with different inherent colors/textures. A pipeline is presented to automatically generate textured, true scale metric models, which can be used for quantitative studies or visualization. The practability of our system is explored in the specific area of digital archiving of historically significant objects.