A Service-oriented FPGA-based 3D Model Acquisition System

Abstract

This paper proposes a non-contact, low cost 3D scanning solution using laser striping. The solution is composed of two main parts: the hardware setup - used for acquiring the object's 3D surface information, and the software part - that processes the information and obtains the 3D model representation of the object. We propose two major improvements over the traditional scanning solutions: the 3D information acquisition is based on a reconfigurable hardware platform - a Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA - which adds flexibility and scalability to the scanning process, while the 3D model reconstruction is remotely available "as a Service", by the means of a web interface that abstracts away the complexity of the underlying processes and improves the performance, while granting easy sharing between users. By separating data capture process from the 3D model reconstruction tasks the system gains in portability - a feature that is absent for most existing solutions. The service-oriented approach brings on a performance gain, since the computational intensive tasks are handled by dedicated servers and ease of use of the system, because the user does not have to bother managing and using the software tools locally.

Keywords

• computer vision
• reconfigurable architectures
• virtual prototyping
• virtual reality
• web services