Build Your Own 3D Scanner: Optical Triangulation for Beginners

Wednesday, 16 December | 10:45 AM - 2:30 PM | Room 501

Over the last decade, digital photography has entered the mainstream. Inexpensive, miniaturized cameras are now routinely included in consumer electronics. Digital projection is poised to make a similar breakthrough, with a variety of vendors offering small, low-cost projectors. As a result, active imaging is a topic of renewed interest in the computer graphics community. In particular, low-cost homemade 3D scanners are now within reach of students and hobbyists with modest budgets.

This course provides beginners with the mathematics, software, and practical details they need to leverage projector-camera systems in their own 3D scanning projects. An example-driven approach is used throughout; each new concept is illustrated using a practical scanner implemented with off-the-shelf parts. The course concludes by detailing how these new approaches are used in rapid prototyping, entertainment, cultural heritage, and web-based applications.
 

Level

Beginner

Presentation Language

Presented in English

Prerequisites

Basic undergraduate-level knowledge of linear algebra. While executables are provided for beginners, attendees with prior knowledge of Matlab, C/C++, and Java programming will be able to directly examine and modify the source code.

Instructor(s)

Douglas Lanman 
Gabriel Taubin 
Brown University

Instructor Bio(s)

Douglas Lanman
Douglas Lanman is a fourth-year PhD student at Brown University. His research is focused on computational photography, particularly the use of active illumination for 3D reconstruction. He received a BS in applied physics with honors from the California Institute of Technology in 2002 and a MS in electrical engineering from Brown University in 2006. Prior to joining Brown, he was an assistant research staff member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory from 2002-2005. He has worked as an intern at Intel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, INRIA Rhône-Alpes, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), and the MIT Media Lab.
Gabriel Taubin
Gabriel Taubin is an associate professor of engineering and computer science at Brown University. He earned a Licenciado en Ciencias Matemáticas from Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1981 and a PhD in electrical engineering from Brown in 1991. He was named an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to three-dimensional geometry compression technology and multimedia standards. He received the Eurographics 2002 Günter Enderle Best Paper Award. And he was named an IBM Master Inventor. He has authored 58 reviewed book chapters, journal papers, and conference papers, and is a co-inventor on 43 international patents. Before joining Brown in 2003, he was a research staff member and manager at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center for 13 years. During the 2000-2001 academic year, he was a visiting professor of electrical engineering at Calfornia Institute of Technology. His main line of research has been related to the development of efficient, simple, and mathematically sound algorithms to operate on 3D objects represented as polygonal meshes, with an emphasis on technologies to enable the use of 3D models for web-based applications.