Portable inspection tool for a photometric stereo and light field approach

In order to analysing bulky and heavy objects or infrastructure with an optical inspection system on-site analyses are required because it is not possible to move this kind of objects. Therefore, a portable inspection system was developed in the course of this thesis which enables local analyses using a photometric stereo and light field imaging approach to obtain surface information. Hence, the acquisition-setup consisting of a camera and a segmented light source moves over the object’s surface in a controlled way and captures images sequentially. The scene is illuminated from four different light directions in order to retrieve surface information and further to derive a 3D-model. The image-processing is performed by an external computer because high-performance graphic cards and enormous computational power are needed.