Recovering Transparent Shape from Time-of-Flight Distortion

Kenichiro Tanaka, Yasuhiro Mukaigawa, Hiroyuki Kubo, Yasuyuki Matsushita, Yasushi Yagi

Abstract: This paper presents a method for recovering shape and normal of a transparent object from a single viewpoint using a Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera. Our method is built upon the fact that the speed of light varies with the refractive index of the medium and therefore the depth measurement of a transparent object with a ToF camera may be distorted. We show that, from this ToF distortion, the refractive light path can be uniquely determined by estimating a single parameter. We estimate this parameter by introducing a surface normal consistency between the one determined by a light path candidate and the other computed from the corresponding shape. The proposed method is evaluated by both simulation and real-world experiments and shows faithful transparent shape recovery.