<title>Novel 3D handheld camera based on triaperture lens</title>

Abstract

The paper presents a novel 3-D hand-held camera to get the depth information from a single snap shot. Traditionally, a stereo system needs two cameras to reconstruct the 3-D shape. We propose a technique which can be applied to the commercial digital signal camera, and make the 2D camera be able to capture 3D information. The proposed 3-D hand-held camera contains three major components: a flash, a commercial camera, and a triaperture lens. The flash projects the speckle pattern onto the object and the camera captures a single snap shot at the same time. In order to embed the 3-D information in one captured image, we use a novel lens containing three off-axis apertures, where each aperture was attached one color filter. Therefore, a captured image carries the information from three different viewing directions. A hierarchical pseudo sub-pixel correlation algorithm is proposed to compute the disparity vectors at a fast speed. It is an adaptive block-based correlation process based on the sparse array of the extracted features. The experimental results show that our approach is robust and convincing.