High-resolution, real-time 3D shape measurement on a portable device

Recent advances in technology have enabled the acquisition of high-resolution 3D models in real-time though the use of structured light scanning techniques. While these advances are impressive, they require large amounts of computing power, thus being limited to using large desktop computers with high end CPUs and sometimes GPUs. This is undesirable in making high-resolution real-time 3D scanners ubiquitous in our mobile lives. To address this issue, this work describes and demonstrates a real-time 3D scanning system that is realized on a mobile device, namely a laptop computer, which can achieve speeds of 20fps 3D at a resolution of 640x480 per frame. By utilizing a graphics processing unit (GPU) as a multipurpose parallel processor, along with a parallel phase shifting technique, we are able to realize the entire 3D processing pipeline in parallel. To mitigate high speed camera transfer problems, which typically require a dedicated frame grabber, we make use of USB 3.0 along with direct memory access (DMA) to transfer camera images to the GPU. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the technique, we experiment with the scanner on both static geometry of a statue and dynamic geometry of a deforming material sample in front of the system.