Visualization of partially occluded 3D object using wedge prism-based axially distributed sensing

Recently, an axially distributed sensing system (ADS) was proposed for three-dimensional imaging and visualization. In ADS system, the 3D information cannot be collected when the coordinates of the object are close to the optical axis. In this paper, we present a wedge-prism based axially distributed sensing for improving the visual quality of 3D reconstructed images. In the proposed method, a wedge prism is placed in front of a camera and the parallax information is collected through the wedge prism by translating the wedge prism and the image sensor together along the optical axis. Accordingly, the 3D object is recorded as the improved multiple 2D perspective images within the full area of the image sensor. The volumetric images are generated from the recorded elemental images using a computational reconstruction algorithm based on ray back-projection. The proposed method is applied to partially occluded 3D object visualization. Preliminary experiments are performed to verify the approach.