TurboSL: Dense Accurate and Fast 3D by Neural Inverse Structured Light

We show how to turn a noisy and fragile active triangulation technique--three-pattern structured light with a grayscale camera--into a fast and powerful tool for 3D capture: able to output sub-pixel accurate disparities at megapixel resolution along with reflectance normals and a no-reference estimate of its own pixelwise 3D error. To achieve this we formulate structured-light decoding as a neural inverse rendering problem. We show that despite having just three or four input images--all from the same viewpoint--this problem can be tractably solved by TurboSL an algorithm that combines (1) a precise image formation model (2) a signed distance field scene representation and (3) projection pattern sequences optimized for accuracy instead of precision. We use TurboSL to reconstruct a variety of complex scenes from images captured at up to 60 fps with a camera and a common projector. Our experiments highlight TurboSL's potential for dense and highly-accurate 3D acquisition from data captured in fractions of a second.