3D FlashLight is a venture developing a new 3-dimensional (3D) scanning technology, inexpensive, fast and high resolution. From the technical point of view, our new technology is capable of retrieving sub-millimetre 3D geometrical features of surfaces. As highly accurate surface reconstruction can be useful for countless fields as surface inspection, quality control in manufacturing, biometric sensors, volumetric reconstruction, cultural heritage and medical analysis.
The acquisition process of data for retrieving the 3D geometry of the surface under inspection makes our technology overcome current limitation in the market of short-range 3D scanners. In fact, it consists of flashing LED light sources synchronised with a digital camera. This implies both inexpensiveness and high-speed acquisition (fraction of a second). The 3D reconstruction itself is also very fast as it is implemented on parallel computing platform. We built a proof of concept prototype that we are improving considering a second version with improved features.
Competitor 3D scanners are based on structured light and laser technologies and one way to assess their value is through accuracy, speed, cost and customisability ranges. Regarding accuracy, 3D FlashLight can obtain comparable results with laser scanners, but this has to be considered with the fact that to get this accuracy a laser scanner needs few tens of minutes whereas 3D FlashLight has comparable acquisition time with structured light technology. Given the inexpensive components, the hardware cost of 3D FlashLight is also very low compared with the competition. Finally, since 3D FlashLight is made of components highly adjustable, customisability is very high as a 3D scanner based on our technology can be shaped to fit onto existing framework of industrial pipeline or robotic arms.