Structured light with a million light planes per second

TL;DR

This paper presents a high-speed structured light 3D scanning system using a custom acousto-optic device and event camera, achieving 1000 fps and surpassing previous speed records by innovative adaptive scanning strategies.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel structured light system with a custom acousto-optic scanner and adaptive strategies, enabling unprecedented 3D scanning speeds of 1000 fps.

Findings

Achieved 1000 fps full-frame 3D scanning.

Used a custom acousto-optic device for projecting 2 million light planes per second.

Implemented adaptive scanning to surpass theoretical camera speed limits.

Abstract

We introduce a structured light system that enables full-frame 3D scanning at speeds of $1000\text{ fps}$, four times faster than the previous fastest systems. Our key innovation is the use of a custom acousto-optic light scanning device capable of projecting two million light planes per second. Coupling this device with an event camera allows our system to overcome the key bottleneck preventing previous structured light systems based on event cameras from achieving higher scanning speeds -- the limited rate of illumination steering. Unlike these previous systems, ours uses the event camera's full-frame bandwidth, shifting the speed bottleneck from the illumination side to the imaging side. To mitigate this new bottleneck and further increase scanning speed, we introduce adaptive scanning strategies that leverage the event camera's asynchronous operation by selectively illuminating regions of interest, thereby achieving effective scanning speeds an order of magnitude beyond the camera's theoretical limit.