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With industrial design drawings, we're taught to use contour lines to convey an object's form. Most of you already know what I mean, but laypeople, look at the sketches above (courtesy of ID Sketching, by the way). Obviously the lines you see bisecting the camera lenses, and the centerlines on the car and the objects in the bottom sketch are not meant to appear on the finished product, but they quickly help your eye detect contour and volume.
A research team at Japan's AIST (Advanced Industrial Science & Technology) has cleverly exploited this idea and applied it towards motion-capture and measuring applications. What they've done is designed a grid pattern comprised of wavy lines, then used a projector to cast it onto whatever's being scanned. After recording the proceedings with a high-speed camera, software then examines the grid, frame-by-frame; by observing the way each line breaks, the software can calculate the volume.
See it in action:
via diginfonews
Comments
This is how GOM Atos scanners work, by projecting a line pattern.
http://www.gom.com/
This is basically how the Microsoft Kinect works right now, albeit at a lower resolution. A scanner that has been on the market for a couple years now and uses the same technology in the article is called Mantis-Vision and can both do scene reconstruction and motion capture. http://mantis-vision.com/
Structured light scanning like the GOM have been around for a while and traditionally use a rolling bar pattern, that requires motionless environments and objects. Companies like Steinbichler, Breukmann, and 3 Rivers do this at an extremely high level as well.