Hamming Color Code for Dense and Robust One-shot 3D Scanning

We propose a novel color code, Hamming color code, designed for rapid 3D shape acquisition using structured light projection. The Hamming color code has several properties which are desirable for practical 3D acquisition as follows. First, the Hamming distance of adjacent colors is always 1, which makes the color detection robust to color blending due to defocusing, subsurface scattering, or chromatic aberration. Second, the substrings of a certain length is guaranteed to be unique. In other words, the Hamming code can be viewed as a subset of de Bruijn sequence. Third, a one-dimensional coordinate can be encoded for each pixel, which enables dense 3D reconstruction from a single pattern projection. Thanks to the uniqueness and robustness of the substrings, the structured light can be decoded stably by dynamic programming. We have implemented parallel dynamic programming on GPU and achieved the speed-up by a factor of 630 compared to the CPU-based implementation, and accomplished video-rate 3D acquisition using commodity hardware. Several experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the stability and performance of our algorithm. Finally we discuss the limitation and future direction of this work.