Improving Cheap 3D Scanners

MIT Figured Out How to Make Cheap 3D Scanners 1,000 Times Better

Adam Clark Estes | December 1, 2015

Scientists developed pretty good 3D-imaging technology a while ago. They’ve also developed cheap 3D-imaging technology. Good and cheap has always been tough, but researchers at MIT have made a breakthrough using old fashioned polarization. The quality isn’t just good either–it’s great.
To be more specific, the new polarization technique can increase the resolution of any cheap, conventional 3D-imaging device by a factor of 1,000. That not only makes it leaps and bounds better than your grainy old Microsoft Kinect, it makes it better than high-precision and not-at-all portable laser scanners.

By combining the information from the Kinect depth frame in (a) with polarized photographs, MIT researchers reconstructed the 3-D surface shown in (c). Polarization cues can allow coarse depth sensors like Kinect to achieve laser scan quality (b). Source: http://news.mit.edu/2015/algorithms-boost-3-d-imaging-resolution-1000-times-1201

<more at http://gizmodo.com/mit-figured-out-how-to-make-cheap-3d-scanners-1-000-tim-1745454853; related links: http://news.mit.edu/2015/algorithms-boost-3-d-imaging-resolution-1000-times-1201 (Making 3-D imaging 1,000 times better. Algorithms exploiting light’s polarization boost resolution of commercial depth sensors 1,000-fold. December 1, 2015) and http://www.3ders.org/articles/20151201-mit-develops-3d-scanners-cheaper-and-1000x-better-than-current-technology.html (MIT develops 3D scanners cheaper and 1,000x better than current technology. December 1, 2015)>