Blocks-World Cameras

For several vision and robotics applications, 3D geometry of man-made environments such as indoor scenes can be represented with a small number of dominant planes. However, conventional 3D vision techniques typically first acquire dense 3D point clouds before estimating the compact piece-wise planar representations (e.g., by plane-fitting). This approach is costly, both in terms of acquisition and computational requirements, and potentially unreliable due to noisy point clouds. We propose Blocks-World Cameras, a class of imaging systems which directly recover dominant planes of piece-wise planar scenes (Blocks-World), without requiring point clouds. The Blocks-World Cameras are based on a structured-light system projecting a single pattern with a sparse set of cross-shaped features. We develop a novel geometric algorithm for recovering scene planes without explicit correspondence matching, thereby avoiding computationally intensive search or optimization routines. The proposed approach has low device and computational complexity, and requires capturing only one or two images. We demonstrate highly efficient and precise planar-scene sensing with simulations and real experiments, across various imaging conditions, including defocus blur, large lighting variations, ambient illumination, and scene clutter.