Introduction

e-light is a free to use structured light software developed by e-birb. It is designed to be easy to use and to provide high quality 3D scans.

You can bring your home made setup/3d scanner or configure a professional one, e-light will adapt to your needs.

How a structured light scanner works

A structured light scanner works by projecting a series of patterns onto an object and capturing the resulting images with a camera(s). The software then processes the images to reconstruct the 3D shape of the object.

In order for this technique to work, the software needs to know the position of the projector and the camera(s) relative to each other. This is usually done by calibrating the system before scanning.
Calibration is usually done by simply scanning a calibration target (a printed grid).

After the calibration, the system is ready to acquire: now each pixel seen by the cameras are matched with a visual ray of the projector, giving a series of 3D points that can be used to reconstruct the object.

Subsequent steps may include:

• filtering the points to remove noise / unwanted points
• alignment of multiple scans to create a single 3D point cloud
• meshing the points to create the final 3D model

All this and much more is done by the software and will be covered in the following sections.

In the next section we will see how to set up the hardware for a DIY 3D Scanner. For a professional setup, refer to the custom scanner section.

Have fun scanning!