Acquisition of 3D structure of selectable quality from image streams

In this paper we present a computational approach for extracting three-dimensional structure of controllable resolution, depth of field, and accuracy, all made available at real-time speeds. This approach utilizes the spatial and the temporal gradients of the streams of images acquired using an actively controlled camera. Depending on the requirements of a particular task, appropriate parameters such as disparity value sought, the inter-frame camera displacement, and number of frames in a stream, are chosen to control the resolution, depth of field, and accuracy. The acquisition and processing of the image stream are done in real-time on a pipeline architecture based processor. Extensive experiments are presented to demonstrate the accuracy, controllability of depth of field and resolution, and ability to perform successfully in a variety of scenes. The system operated with no latency between the image acquisition and processing. The total acquisition and processing time in these experiments is in the range of 0.27 to 1.56 sec. The depth results have an accuracy of 85% to 92%.<>