Reconstructing the surface of transparent objects by polarized light measurements

Abstract

The paper presents a method aimed at accurately reconstructing transparent objects using the area source. The method called polarized light measurements (PLM) combines two reconstruction techniques: polarization analyses and light-path triangulation. The originality of this study relies on the PLM method that enables to extract the radiometric cues and geometric cues simultaneously during the surface reconstruction. To validate performance, a series of the comparison experiments are developed on different objects for the diverse thickness, material and curvature radius of unit under test. The subsequent error analyses are applied to evaluate the method, and the error distribution can be well observed in the results. The PLM performs an efficient process and a higher accuracy compared with traditional reconstruction on transparent objects made by the polarization analyses and triangulation method used alone.