Active 3D Shape Acquisition Using Smartphones

In this paper, we propose an active 3D shape acquisition method based on photometric stereo using smartphone’s camera and flash. A pair of smartphones collaborates as the master and slave, in which the slave projects illumina-tion from different locations while the master captures the images and processes photometric stereo algorithm to re-construct 3D shape. In order to reduce the error, the smart-phone’s camera is calibrated to overcome the effect of lens distortion and nonlinear camera sensor response. We ap-ply SURF feature matching and five-point algorithm to esti-mate the relative pose between the master and slave smart-phones. Then the lighting direction is estimated to run pho-tometric stereo algorithm. All procedures are implemented on an off-the-shelf smartphone. Experimental result shows that the proposed system enables us to use smartphone as a 3D shape capturing device with low cost and reasonable quality. 1