Ideas for fast and cheap object capture

Abstract

This paper is a preliminary description of three technologies for use in scanning and printing. There aren't a lot of experimental data here, unfortunately, because the ideas are new. They came out of a current effort to build a pocket-sized, battery-powered, non-contact 3-D input device. The concept of this pocket 3-D scanner is to allow someone to take simultaneous range and intensity images of a 10-50 cm diameter area in half a second, store a hundred or so of them, then play them back into a PC infrared port for OCR, printing, archival storage, or further processing. Such areas include flat or crinkled paper, hands and faces, machined parts, textures, and many others. Besides their use in input devices, these technologies could greatly improve the performance of low-end laser printers, at very low cost. None of these techniques is yet at a high state of development. The first is a scanning technique that should allow increasing pixel rates by a factor of 10 or more without significant additional optical or mechanical complexity; the second is an extremely fast focus actuator that (if it works) should reduce the field flatness and accuracy requirements of the scan lens and scanner assembly, by allowing fast focus correction even within a scan line; and the third is a `mass customizing' wavefront aberration correction method for producing very high quality laser beams from low quality optics, without requiring any hand work.