Physical Scans

Abstract

Images of a real scene taken with a camera commonly differ from synthetic images of a virtual replica of the same scene, despite advances in light transport simulation and calibration. By explicitly co-developing the scanning hardware and rendering pipeline we are able to achieve negligible per-pixel difference between the real image taken by the camera and the synthesized image on geometrically complex calibration object with known material properties. This approach provides an ideal test-bed for developing data-driven algorithms in the area of 3D reconstruction, as the synthetic data is indistinguishable from real data and can be generated at large scale. Pixel-wise matching also provides an effective way to quantitatively evaluate data-driven reconstruction algorithms.