Dynamic Fluid Surface Acquisition Using a Camera Array

Acquiring dynamic 3D fluid surfaces is a challenging problem in computer vision. Single or stereo camera based solutions are sensitive to refraction distortions, fast fluid motions, and calibration errors. In this paper, we present a multi-view based solution for robustly capturing fast evolving fluid wavefronts. We first construct a portable, 3x3 camera array system as the main acquisition device. We elaborately design the system to allow high-resolution and high-speed capture. To recover fluid surfaces, we place a known pattern beneath the surface and position the camera array on top to observe the pattern. By tracking the distorted feature points over time and across cameras, we obtain spatial-temporal correspondence maps and we use them for specular carving to reconstruct the time-varying surface. In case one of the cameras loses track due to distortions or blurs, we use the rest of the cameras to construct the surface and then apply multi-perspective warping to locate the lo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ICCV
• Authors: Yuanyuan Ding, Feng Li, Yu Ji, Jingyi Yu
• Keywords: Calibration Errors, Camera Array, Computer Vision, Correspondence Maps, ICCV 2011