Turn any webcam into 3D Scanner

The Cambridge University Engineering Department developed ProForma. ProFORMA (which stands for ‘Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition’) turns any ordinary webcam into a powerful 3D scanning tool.

Users can rotate an object in front of the camera and have it construct a 3D model. This reconstruction is displayed in real-time to the user so that they can make adjustments and focus on trouble spots.

Off-line model reconstruction relies on an image collection phase and a slow reconstruction phase, requiring a long time to verify a model obtained from an image sequence is acceptable. We propose a new model acquisition system, called ProFORMA, which generates a 3D model on-line as the input sequence is being collected. As the user rotates the object in front of a stationary camera, a partial model is reconstructed and displayed to the user to assist view planning. The model is also used by the system to robustly track the pose of the object. Models are rapidly produced through a Delaunay tetrahedralisation of points obtained from on-line structure from motion estimation, followed by a probabilistic tetrahedron carving step to obtain a textured surface mesh of the object.

Read the academic paper here: http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~qp202/my_papers/BMVC09/