Diffuse mirrors: 3D reconstruction from diffuse indirect illumination using inexpensive time-of-flight sensors

Felix Heide, Lei Xiao, Wolfgang Heidrich, Matthias B. Hullin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

190 Scopus citations

Abstract

The functional difference between a diffuse wall and a mirror is well understood: one scatters back into all directions, and the other one preserves the directionality of reflected light. The temporal structure of the light, however, is left intact by both: assuming simple surface reflection, photons that arrive first are reflected first. In this paper, we exploit this insight to recover objects outside the line of sight from second-order diffuse reflections, effectively turning walls into mirrors. We formulate the reconstruction task as a linear inverse problem on the transient response of a scene, which we acquire using an affordable setup consisting of a modulated light source and a time-of-flight image sensor. By exploiting sparsity in the reconstruction domain, we achieve resolutions in the order of a few centimeters for object shape (depth and laterally) and albedo. Our method is robust to ambient light and works for large room-sized scenes. It is drastically faster and less expensive than previous approaches using femtosecond lasers and streak cameras, and does not require any moving parts.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2014 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Pages3222-3229
Number of pages8
ISBN (Print)9781479951178; 9781479951178
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2014

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