Scanning with Light

In November 2010 I tried structured-light scanning with ThreePhase, Kyle McDonald’s open-source software. A projector throws three stripe patterns onto an object, each shifted a third of a step from the last, and a camera photographs each one. The software works out the depth of every point from how the stripes bend across the surface.

I scanned a model brain. The captures are dated 22 November 2010. From them came a point cloud and a mesh of about 49,000 triangles.

The model brain on its stand rendered as a shaded grey-blue mesh on black. — The mesh, rendered from the scan file.

Captures

Close-up of the stripes following the folds of the brain.

An earlier capture with finer, denser stripes.

The point cloud on screen, a dotted brain on its base.