Fixed-Lens camera setup and calibrated image registration for multifocus multiview 3D reconstruction

Image-based 3D reconstruction or 3D photogrammetry of small-scale objects including insects and biological specimens is challenging due to the use of a high magnification lens with inherently limited depth of field, and the object’s fine structures. Therefore, the traditional 3D reconstruction techniques cannot be applied without additional image preprocessing. One such preprocessing technique is multifocus stacking/fusion that combines a set of partially focused images captured at different distances from the same viewing angle to create a single in-focus image. We found that the image formation is not properly considered by the traditional multifocus image capture and stacking techniques. The resulting in-focus images contain artifacts that violate the perspective projection. A 3D reconstruction using such images often fails to produce accurate 3D models of the captured objects. This paper shows how this problem can be solved effectively by a new multifocus multiview 3D reconstruction procedure which includes a new Fixed-Lens multifocus image capture and a calibrated image registration technique using analytic homography transformation. The experimental results using the real and synthetic images demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solutions by showing that both the fixed-lens image capture and multifocus stacking with calibrated image alignment significantly reduce the errors in the camera poses and produce more complete 3D reconstructed models as compared with those by the conventional moving lens image capture and multifocus stacking.