3D scanning possible with simple webcam

The software, ProFORMA (Probabilistic Feature based Online Rapid Model Acquisition), was written by a team of developers at the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University. It allows users to rotate any object in front of a camera, which is then scanned in real time and built into a 3D texture mapped model. The 3D image is generated as the input sequence is being collected and, once scanned, the camera continues to track the object and matches its movement with the on screen model. By generating a 3D point cloud from the image on camera, the software works out where the surfaces are and ignores any obstructions of the model. It then utilises a process known as Delaunay tetrahedralisation, which rapidly produces models from points obtained from online structures from motion estimation. This is followed by a probabilistic tetrahedron carving step to obtain a textured surface mesh of the object and transformation of images from 2D to 3D.