When Specular Object Meets RGB-D Camera 3D Scanning: Color Image Plus Fragmented Depth Map

Abstract

3D scanning is an important technology since one can apply the scanning results of objects to numerous 3D applications (e.g. artwork sculpture preserving, 3D animation and 3D printing). However, 3D laser scanners are too expensive to be adopted in daily usage. Therefore, building a 3D scanner by a low cost RGB-D camera (e.g. Kinect) is an emerging trend. For a 3D scanner, a specular object is one of the challenging 3D scanning targets where the specular surface will compromise the scanning (laser) lights and lead to scanning failure. In order to acquire the ground truth for 3D scanning of specular objects, we have to perform a non-specular painting process even a 3D laser scanner is used. In order to meet this challenge for an RGB-D camera based 3D scanner, we integrate the response of visual cues reflection and the depth scattering characteristics of specular surfaces to resolve the artifacts of 3D scanning results. Experimental results show our proposed system outperforms the traditional RGB-D 3D scanners in reconstruction quality while keeping the specular object intact (i.e., we need not to perform the pre-described non-specular painting process on the object before scanning).