Adaptive Albedo Compensation for Accurate Phase-Shift Coding

Among structured light strategies, the ones based on phase shift are considered to be the most adaptive with respect to the features of the objects to be captured. Inter alia, the theoretical invariance to signal strength and the absence of discontinuities in intensity, make phase shift an ideal candidate to deal with complex surfaces of unknown geometry, color and texture. However, in practical scenarios, unexpected artifacts could still result due to the characteristics of real cameras. This is the case, for instance, with high contrast areas resulting from abrupt changes in the albedo of the captured objects. In fact, the not negligible size of pixels and the presence of blur can produce a mix of signal integration from adjacent areas with different albedo. This, in turn, would result in a bias in the phase recovery and, consequentially, in an inaccurate 3D reconstruction of the surface. While this problem affects most structure light methods based on phase shift or derived techniques, little effort has been put in addressing it. With this paper we propose a model for the phase corruption and a theoretically sound correction step to be adopted to compensate the bias. The practical effectiveness of our approach is well demonstrated by a complete set of experimental evaluations.