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Quorten Blog 1

First blog for all Quorten's blog-like writings

Interesting, but of course, their approach doesn’t nearly meet my demands because it is low-resolution. But, that’s just to show that there is indeed a lot of variation in the sensor requirements.

20161210/https://www.technologyreview.com/s/529986/turning-a-regular-smartphone-camera-into-a-3-d-one/

Okay, cool, I can put these words up another way. If you need resolution, you really only have two choices: visible light and ultrasound. You might have a remote third choice, infrared light, but of course the wavelength has to be relatively short. And that’s the point. You need a short wavelength sound or light source in order to be able to even think about scanning small feature details at high resolution.

  • There are also other practical considerations like the atmospheric absorption of the waves. Ultraviolet light is quickly absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere, and although low-frequency sound can travel long distances through air, high frequency sounds tend to be quickly attenuated over short distances. So, that’s another limitation with ultrasound. On the other hand, ultrasound travels through fluids quite well.

    Likewise, there is a similar problem with some microwave frequencies such as 60 GHz waves. These waves also get readily absorbed by the atmosphere.

** The most key difference between sound waves and electromagnetic waves is that sound waves require a physical medium to travel through, one that can transfer mechanical motion waves. On the other hand, electromagnetic waves can travel through a vacuum. Even so, in the case of imaging the interiors of materials like medical imaging of the interior of the human body, ultrasound can often times turn out to be a more convenient imaging technique than the imaging techniques that rely on electromagnetic radiation.

So anyways, now for the cost analysis. Visible light image sensors are obviously cheap and abundant, but sufficient ultrasound equipment is considerably more expensive. So, visible light it shall be, possibly with some exploration into infrared light.

Oh yeah, X-ray photography is one last option, but again, cost. Cost is the issue with X-ray equipment. There are also more severe safety implications while working with X-rays.

Obviously, for different applications, you’ll have different requirements. Maybe you need to be able to acquire 3D data fast but not at a high resolution. For that, Microsoft’s research into depth cameras as used by the Kinect and the project mentioned above are a good reference on how to build such a sensor. Time-of-flight LIDAR sensors are similarly useful for this purpose, when 1-centimeter feature size limits are not an impediment.

For larger scale scanning, such as for 3D scanning mountains, none of the conventional solutions that use visible light triangulation or ultrasound will be adequate. For such a scale, photogrammetry or radar techniques are necessary. Yes, radar, due to its long wavelength, is not appropriate for scanning small objects.

Yes, and of course I have to reiterate this. The main disadvantage of photogrammetry is that it only works well for making 3D scans of objects with textured surfaces. It’s main advantage is that it can easily be scaled up for making 3D scans of mountains, provided that the photographed mountain has sufficient texture and that you take the photographs from a fast-moving vehicle like an airplane.

One thing we do know from small, hand-held objects is that it is very frequent for such objects to either have texture grain that is too small to be seen clearly by a camera or not enough texture grain for photogrammetry to be a viable technique. Another obvious problem with photogrammetry is that required feature-detection and matching steps are computationally intensive, whereas triangulation of small objects is simple and computationally cheap. Thus, laser triangulation can be executed on low-end, low-power, low-cost computers such as directly native to a smartphone.

Oh yeah, further discussion. Visible light or infrared? This has its relative advantages and disadvantages. Visible light is safer to work with, as the eye has a blink reflex if any bright light inadvertently enters the eye, but the same is not true with infrared light, of which intense such light can cause eye damage. On the other hand, if one takes reasonable safe-guards to prevent strong infrared light from entering one’s eyes, then infrared light can be less intrusive when scanning the landscape of public parks or buildings that one does not own. Yeah, something to think about.

Oh yeah, on infrared. Another disadvantage. Remember, the infrared spectrum is much wider than the visible light spectrum, so it turns out that it is generally harder to get light sources and cameras that match on the infrared spectrum than it is on the visible light spectrum, as evidenced in this article on one person’s experience using the Raspberry Pi NoIR module with an infrared flood lamp source. The Raspberry Pi NoIR camera wants an 880nm wavelength infrared light source, but the IR illuminator used was 850nm.

20161210/https://www.linux.com/learn/give-your-raspberry-pi-night-vision-pinoir-camera

Okay, let’s compare that to the various wavelengths used for red laser light. 635nm-670nm. Okay, actually that’s a similar range for being off on the wavelength. So, it seems being off by 30nm is okay, but much more than 30nm is probably not okay.

20161210/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_diode#Common_wavelengths

Oh yeah, don’t forget, you might also be able to use a laser mouse as an infrared laser light source. Yeah, that’s totally being creative. Seriously.

Okay, so you know what? I was wondering about the feasibility of getting an infrared laser of the right wavelength, so I looked at my Quarton laser product data sheets for the available products, and indeed, I am in luck, there is an 850nm infrared dot laser module. Unfortunately, I am also out of luck for the reason that there are no infrared laser line generators available, so as far as this one manufacturer is concerned, I’m toast for infrared 3D scanning.

Also, yes, it turned out to be harder to find information on using the Raspberry Pi NoIR camera for dual visible and infrared light than I thought. There turned out to be far less information available on the Internet than I was hoping for. But, I am in partial luck. I’ve found but one how-to article that includes a link to a potentially useful device available on Ebay.

20161211/http://nestboxtech.blogspot.com/2014/10/how-to-make-your-own-raspberry-pi-trail.html
untested/http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-M12x0-5-IR-CUT-Day-Night-Filter-Switcher-CCTV-CMOS-Board-Camera-/231339792798?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item35dced199e

And, continuing on the subject of Raspberty Pi NoIR. Yes, it’s also possible to do some IR filtering in software simply by setting the white balance. You won’t get good results for photographing plants, but for photographing inanimate objects, you’ll get some sort of believable natural color results.

Also note that on the Raspberry Pi NoIR camera, the mass majority of infrared light is picked up on the blue channel. Why is that? This is because the blue light wavelength is harmonic with the infrared light wavelength, which causes the blue channel to pick up most infrared light. So there you go, Rebecca G. Bettencourt. The wavelength harmonics actually do have a meaning, just not with human eyes. But with machine sensor electronics, this is something worth considering, within the wavelength sensitivity limits of a device, that is.

20161210/https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=59683

Do we have any recommendations on good IR and visible light filters to use with the Raspberry Pi NoIR camera? Well, that’s a tough question, but along the way, we’ve mentioned that the reason why color filters and photographic film are transparent to infrared light was to prevent build-up of heat inside the projectors of older equipment that used incandescent bulbs. So putting these filters in front of a Raspberry Pi camera serves as an effective visible light filter.

Also, you know the blue gel filter that is included with the Raspberry Pi NoIR camera? That filter technically filters out red and green light, but lets blue light pass through. So that’s what the magical “hyperspectral imaging” is really about.

20161210/https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=137403

Unforutnately, after all that searching and reading for information on using a Raspberry Pi NoIR camera as a dual visible light and infrared camera, I gained no insight. There just doesn’t seem to be enough information out there, I’ve got to instead ogo through some turmoltulous process of trail and error of searching on sales websites. And yeah, I don’t like doing that.