Projects and Research
While our environment consists of three dimensions, most media use two-dimensional output devices. The processing, display and perception of three-dimensional data has always excited me. This fascination for 3D is what drives me in my research.
In the following current and past projects are listed.
Hochschule Furtwangen University (since 2021)
Free3D
An ongoing master research project about exploring technologies to create 3D videos. The input will be three Azure Kinect cameras from which a 3D scene is captured and reconstructed. 3D Gaussian Splatting and NeRF provide highly potential options. Stay tuned for the project results.
Projection Mapping in the wild
A student project that I supervised together with Regina Reusch and VIOSO. The final project results can are shown here.
VISMO
First student project, see project page for the details and results.
SICK AG Waldkirch (2012 - 2021)
Most projects with SICK have been confidential.
Smart 3D cameras
Some work was presented at the “77. Heidelberger Bildverarbeitungsforum” by my team member Andreas Richert.
Change detection
We patented a method for change detection that was implemented in one of our products.
Hololens
Some work was presented and published at the var² conference in Chemnitz in 2017.
TU Berlin (2006 - 2012)
These were the main two research topics I was working on at TU Berlin:
Combining time-of-flight with stereo
I work on this topic for about two years. It all started with a student project “Scanning real world objects without worries”. Subsequently, I supervised the diploma thesis of Antoine Mischler who focusses on real-time stereo and depth estimation for augmented reality applications. More information the project can be found here. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you are interested in my work.
Multi-touch
I also do some research on multi-touch. We built a multi-touch table during a course project with a couple of students. Sorry, but the project website is offline, but feel free to contact me in order to get more information. See the publications page for a poster that has been presented at Siggraph 2008.
Side projects
Kinect
When the first Kinect for XBox camera was first released in 2010, it became a hot topic in the Computer Vision and Graphics research and artist scene. It was very cheap and an early reverse engineering hack allowed 3D data access via OpenNI. As a side project I supported Markus Wambsganss in the creation of 200-DOF. A short film from 2012 that was shot with DSLR, Kinect and Super8 technology.
Weimar (2000 - 2006)
This is a list of projects and seminar works I realized during my studies at Bauhaus University Weimar.
Diploma thesis: “Weighting in Laplacian Mesh Editing”
This diploma thesis has been created in cooperation with DaimlerChrysler. A software has been developed that supports the assembly simulations performed by design engineers. An assembly simulation examines the collision of units. These virtual units are presented as triangular meshes and they are currently solid and undeformable in contrast to real world objects. This software simulates the natural solidness of the units by allowing to deform the virtual objects in a natural manner. To do this, a Laplacian mesh editing scheme has been implemented. Laplacian mesh editing allows to deform 3D objects while their surface details are preserved. Detail preservation is an important feature because it allows the simulation of realistic deformations.
The thesis focuses on examining the effects of different weighting schemes for a Laplacian mesh editing method. This method supports the assembly simulation which is performed during the phase of construction in automotive design. Thus, it has been adapted to the special requirements of such an application by the use of different weights. The deformations are computed by the help of a minimisation method. The present work describes the usage of alternative weights within these minimisation and its effects. In addition, an automatic weighting method has been developed that allows rapid editing tasks.
Slides (PDF), Full text (PDF), Video: Bunny (AVI), Video: Sphere (AVI)
Optical Tracking
During two projects we worked on tracking input devices for virtual reality applications. In the first part, we tracked LEDs an reconstructed their position in 3D space with a multi view setup of several small firewire cameras. In the second part, we worked on tracking colored objects with a single camera and on computing the position of a rack of laser pointers by tracking their light spots and calculate back their origin.
Final presentation slides of the second part. (PDF)
Gasblasen
In industry gas bubbles are used to clean oil. The path of these bubbles want to be predictable. In our project we analyzed the path of a bubble in a water tank captured by two video cameras. We described the path as a spiral in order to minimze the error while having a simple description of the path of any further bubble in any other liquid. Unfortunately, we never received more data to prove our system.
German slides (PDF), German documenation (PDF)
Holographics
First, I did some research on digital holography. In order to print a hologram we took a picture of a car’s headlamp from each viewing angle (see video). The whole process is described in the term paper and the slides of our presentation. I joined the holographics research project in 2004. The aim of the project was to combine holograms with interactive computer graphics.