Diffuse Mirrors: 3D Reconstruction from Diffuse Indirect Illumination using Inexpensive Time-of-Flight Sensors

Felix Heide, Lei Xiao, Wolfgang Heidrich and Matthias B. Hullin
Proc. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2014.

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 turn- ing 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.

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BibTeX Citation

@InProceedings{HeideCVPR2014, author = {Felix Heide and Lei Xiao and Wolfgang Heidrich and Matthias B. Hullin}, title = {Diffuse Mirrors: {3D} Reconstruction from Diffuse Indirect Illumination Using Inexpensive Time-of-Flight Sensors}, booktitle = {IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)}, year = {2014}, month = {June}, }