Antensteiner Awarded EMVA Young Professional Award

Doris Antensteiner at the Austrian Institute of Technology’s Center for Vision, Automation and Control has been awarded the 2018 European Machine Vision Association’s (EMVA) Young Professional Award for her work using light field and photometric stereo to acquire highly precise 3D surface reconstructions of objects.

Recovering the shape and reflectance properties of a scene are fundamental problems in computer vision. Conventional imaging systems provide only limited information, since they cannot capture directional radiance information and provide only the sum of light at each image position. A more complete description can be achieved by using light field cameras and photometric stereo approaches. The awarded work resolves the problematic nature of acquiring the highly precise 3D surface reconstruction of objects with a focus on industrial applications. The combination of a depth map from light field with surface normals from photometric stereo enables a highly precise reconstruction and material analysis.

This feat is achieved by analyzing light rays passing through the camera lens, which capture a scene illuminated from a defined direction. An optimal fusion of light field and photometric stereo is found using variational methods. Solutions both for area-scan and multiline-scan cameras are achieved. The latter allows the algorithms in the awarded work to be apt for a wide range of industrial applications.

Applications of Antensteiner’s work lie in the fields of product inspection, defect detection, brand protection, product security, and optical inspection of materials. A highly precise 3D reconstruction allows a detailed error detection in production lines. Methods of anticounterfeiting can be improved by a better description and analysis of the material structure.