Virtual Pattern Projection Device

Patent title	Virtual Pattern Projection Device
Thematic area	Industry, Digital and Security
Ownership	ALMA MATER STUDIORUM - UNIVERSITA' DI BOLOGNA
Inventors	Matteo Poggi, Fabio Tosi, Stefano Mattoccia, Luca Bartolomei
Protection	Italy
Licensing status	Available for development agreements, option, license and other exploitation agreements
Keywords	virtual pattern projection without a physical pattern projector, robust visual correspondence for handcrafted algorithms and deep networks, active depth sensor used to project virtual patterns into standard images
Filed on	13 July 2023

Despite the improvements enabled by deep-learning, passive stereo struggles facing the visual correspondence problem in some circumstances like, for instance, in the presence of untextured regions. Purposely, active systems project patterns onto the sensed scene to ease this task. However, pattern projectors have severe limitations; they only work at close range, without sunlight, can interfere with other projectors, have thermal drift, etc.

The proposed method enables the effectiveness of active systems without a pattern projector, with all its inherent limitations. The virtual projection in our solution is achieved leveraging a robust depth sensor. Moreover, our method can be extended to other configurations (e.g. multi-view stereo, monocular depth estimation, depth completion, optical flow)

All application fields needing scene depth/flow perception. Improve depth/flow perception enabling higher robustness to domain change issues affecting deep-learning networks. The envisioned setup is already available in many target application fields (e.g., autonomous/assisted driving) and consumer devices (e.g., smartphones and tablets)